"Thebais, multa cruciata lima
Tentat, audaci fide, Mantuanæ
Gaudia fame.

"Polish'd with endless toil, my lays

At length aspire to Mantuan praise."

The grace and elegance of Ovid is proverbial; but Ovid himself well knew how difficult it was to attain this grace without time and revision. Accordingly, the Epistles which he wrote in his banishment want that exquisite polish which he bestowed on his other writings; but of this he was himself aware, and ascribes it to his want of leisure;—and, as Dr. Johnson observes, "was so far from imagining revisals and corrections unnecessary, that at his departure from Rome, he threw his Metamorphosis into the fire, lest it should be disgraced by a book which he could not hope to finish."

The reviewer, therefore, who censures Mr. Campbell, for chastening his work too much, while he attacks Mr. Curran for not chastening his eloquence-that eloquence which, as we have already shewn, ought to be the pure and unsullied offspring of genuine feeling, no matter in what terms this feeling may express itself, is the advocate of a most perverted taste; and we have no hesitation in saying, that it is the propagation of such false principles, such a vitiated taste, that has misled and bewildered so many of our living poets, many of whom have evinced a bold stretch of genius, but, through actual fear of the reviewers, have written arrant nonsense, that it might appear to be, what the reviewers extolled so much, the offspring of immediate and spontaneous feeling. It was the interest of the reviewers to do so, because it gave them an opportunity of turning them into ridicule for following the directions, and availing themselves of the liberty, we may call it licentiousness, which they not only affected to allow themselves, but which they so strongly recommended.

It is to the labour and repeated revision which Ariosto has bestowed on his work, that he owes his immortality;and we do not hesitate to say, that there is not a single production of the present day on which such labour has not been bestowed, that will ever descend to posterity, no matter whether it be the production of genius or not, for the more genius, the more necessary is the lima labor. Dulness sees but little at a time, and consequently it is more apt to see that little clearly; but genius, in its daring flight, attempts to grasp the unexplored extent of real and imaginary existence. It is, therefore, every moment liable to be deceived, for he who contemplates remote objects cannot so easily discriminate their minuter parts as he whose intellectual vision is confined to ob

jects immediately within his reach. The productions of genius stand, therefore, more in need of correction than those of dulness, not only for the reasons just assigned, but because the latter are not worth correcting, indeed, any work not worth correcting, and correcting again, is not worth publishing, and consequently not worth the critic's observation.

In saying so much on the utility of repeated revisions we have two objects in view: the first arises from our subject, the second from a regard to the literature of our country, and the cultivation of a chaste, elegant, and classical taste. În shewing the necessity of repeated revisions we defend Ariosto-in the first instance, from the imputation of producing a work which, to judge of him by modern criticism, would be more the production of art than of nature; and, in the second, to put writers of undoubted genius on their guard against the pretended liberty allowed them by the critics-those very critics who, while they encourage them to commit faults are lying in wait to pounce upon, and not only expose, but turn into ridicule every fault which they commit. It is the elegance and classical purity of Ariosto's diction that has procured him the epithet of divine, and makes him recognised in Italy as the most pleasing and captivating of Italian poets. A reviewer in the Quarterly, indeed, asserts "that Ariosto's being more pleasing than Tasso arises from the fatiguing corollary which the Jerusalem Delivered forms to the Siege of Troy."-What an admirable and profound observation! And yet we are inclined to suspect that no man thinks of the Siege of Troy while he is reading the Jerusalem Delivered, except the critic himself, who reads it not, as other readers, for pleasure, but for the purposes of his profession.

"Docti orationem artis intelligunt, indocti voluptatem.”

He who is not thinking of criticism, but yields to the spontaneous instinctive influence of every scene, circumstance, and situation which is placed before him in the Jerusalem Delivered, is so strongly affected by them, that he neither thinks of the author nor of the Siege of Troy; but when he turns to Ariosto he feels a pleasure of a higher and more indescribable nature. In reading Tasso, the expression does not always represent the image clearly and distinctly as it exists in nature, because the terms which he makes use of are not always happily chosen ; and whenever this takes place, the image appears either faint or obscure, either deprived of some of its distinguishing and characteristic qualities, or clothed in qualities some of which do and some of which do not properly belong to it. The reader accordingly finds his pleasure interrupted by a something which

he cannot always well describe. The things represented to him are not perfectly to his mind; he thinks he knows them, but there is a something strange in them which he cannot account for. This mars his pleasure, and frequently obliges him to stop to see what there is in the image which he cannot understand. In Ariosto, on the contrary, the terms are so happily chosen, that the object described appears as in real life. We have not to reflect a moment to perceive what the object is. We therefore pass on from object to object, satisfied that we have left nothing behind us of which we are ignorant. Every thing appears clearly and distinctly as it exists in nature. We seem not to be reading of things, but to be in the very midst of them. Every where we behold "the naked nature and the living grace." This is the glorious, the enviable result of a pure and correct style, of selecting such terms as describe objects minutely and faithfully without obscuring them. We shall, therefore, close our observations on Ariosto's style by recommending it to those who imagine "that the language of low and rustic life ought to be preferred because, in their opinion, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, and because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity." (Wordsworth.) We have already said so much on this part of our subject, that we shall not stop to comment on this very plausible but very absurd and delusive theory. We shall avail ourselves of some other opportunity of proving it both one and the other.

But while we thus praise the purity and elegance of Ariosto's style, we think it proper to shew that the language in which he wrote did not perfectly harmonize with his subject, and that it was too sweet, delicate, and melodious a language to make the sound an echo to the sense whenever he describes the crash of arms and the fierce encounter of hostile warriors. In shewing this defect in the language of the Orlando, it is unnecessary to say that it was a defect over which Ariosto had no controul; and that wherever this want of harmony is perceived, wherever the language is sweet and delicate, while the things described are boisterous, terrific, and sublime, the discord must be traced, not to Ariosto, but to the genius of the language in which he wrote. We shall hereafter shew that no translator of Ariosto should adopt his sweet and delicate cadence and melody of verse, who writes in a language capable of making the sound an echo to the sense, in the description of great and heroic achievements.

There are two species of beauty in poetry perfectly distinct from each other. The first arises from the invention or discovery of such images, sentiments, situations, scenes, events

and catastrophes as harmonize not only with each other, but with the nature and design of the subject; and the second from the propriety of the language in which they are expressed. The beauty arising from the images, sentiments, &c. which are, strictly speaking, the beauties of thought, are equally placed within the reach of all poets, in whatever age or nation they are produced, and their not equally attaining them can only arise from inequality of genius; but it is far otherwise in the beauties that arise from style and expression.-The style should always accord with the subject.

"Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,

And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar."

But this accordance, this "echo of the sound to the sense," cannot be attained in many languages. Some are too soft for "the hoarse rough verse," and some too hoarse and rugged to give back the whispers of the gentle zephyr. The French and Italian are, beyond all redemption, incapable of the grand, the terrific, and the sublime, so far as these emotions depend on the sound or echo of the verse. Wherever strength or energy is required, "the hoarse rough voice" is never heard to roar; but where the poet aims at softness and delicacy of colouring, the Italian particularly has all the means of making the "sound an echo to the sense.'

Of this we have a beautiful instance in that fine simile of Ariosto, in which he compares a virgin to the tender and delicate rose.

"La verginella è simile alla rosa

Che'n bel giardin su la nativa spina
Mentre sola, e sicura si riposa,
Nè gregge, nè pastor se le avvicina;
L'aura soave e l'alba rugiadosa
L'acqua, la terra al suo favor s'inchina:
Giovani vaghi, e donne innamorate
Amano Averne e seni e tempie ornate."

CANTO I. STANZA XLII.

"The virgin has her image in the rose,
Sheltered in garden on her native stock,
Which there, in solitude and sweet repose,
Blooms, unapproached by shepherd or by flock.
For this earth teems, and freshening water flows,
And breeze and dewy dawn their sweets unlock :

With such the wishful youth his bosom dresses,

With such the enamoured damsel braids her tresses.".

ROSE.

The very sounds" nativa spina," "sicura si riposa,” “l'aura soave, ""alba rugiadosa," seem to transport us into the delightful scene in which the poet has placed his virgin rose. The Italian language abounds in vowel sounds, particularly in the terminations of words. Indeed there are few words in the language that end in any other. In all words derived from the French or Latin ending in consonants, the Italians invariably reject the consonant, and add a vowel to it. At the same time the Italian has few useless consonants like the French, so that its happy mixture of vowel and consonant sounds renders it the most pleasing and musical in the world. It would seem to have been formed not for the general purposes of language, but for the sole and exclusive communication of pleasure. It is said that the Italian is corrupted Latin, and this corruption is ascribed to the Northern barbarians, who over-ran and subjected the country to their dominion. If this be a fact, how came it to pass, that in the alterations made by these barbarians there is a perfect unity or harmony of design, and all the words impressed with a kindred character, that bespeak it the language of one people. How could barbarians, speaking different languages themselves, fall into the propensity of terminating their words in vowel sounds; but, what is still more difficult to be answered, how could these very barbarians improve and refine the words borrowed from other languages, and render them more musical, clear, and distinct. The Italian rejects all rough and harsh consonants, and particularly abounds in liquids. These liquid sounds they seem to prefer to vowel sounds, for it is a practice with them to reject the final vowel if the preceding consonant happen to be either of the four liquids L, M, N, R.

In fact, if the Italian were a language formed from a mixture of the original Latin, and that of the different nations which over-ran Italy, it would have no fixed and determined character, no propensity of terminating all its words in vowels, because it would have necessarily partaken of the different idioms and genius of the languages spoken by these different nations.Languages," as M. Grandval justly observes, "always retain distinct characteristics of their origin," but the Italian has only one characteristic: it is evidently the language of one people; for a language compounded of different languages would more or less partake of the different characters of each. It would possess the softness, the harshness, the brevity, the diffuseness of the different languages of which it was composed; but the Italian has only one character, that of softness and melody. It