As a poet, he is greatly inferior to SURREY; he is equally learned; but in his writings an almost total absence of ima gination gives them a cold and disagreeable effect, which is not always made up either by depth of thought or strength of expression. The following lines DR. NOTT considers as very nervous and elevated :

"Heaven, and earth, and all that hear me playne,

Do well perceive what care doth make me cry;
Save you alone, to whom I cry in vain
Mercy, madam! alas, I die? I die!"

The next he considers still better

"It is not now, but long and long ago,

I have you serv'd, as to my pow'r and might,
As faithfully as any man might do,

Claiming of you nothing of right, of right;

If I had suffered this to you unware,

Mine were the fault, and you nothing to blame;
But since you know my woe, and all my care,
Why do I die? alas! for shame! for shame!"

But what follows is completely farcical :

Of his Love that pricked her finger with a needle.
"She sat and sewed that had done me the wrong

Whereof I plain, and have done many a day;
And whilst she heard my plaint in piteous song,
Wished my heart the sampler as it lay.
The blind master whom I have serv'd so long,
Grudging to hear that he did hear her say,
Made her own weapon do her finger bleed,

To feel if pricking were so good in deed."

p.69.

Some of his poetry, however, is luckily of a better character; the following in a strain of dignified morality which resembles Comus:

"Alas, my Poynz! how men do seek the best,

And find the worst, by error as they stray!
And no marvel! when sight is so opprest,
And blind the guide, anon out of the way
Goeth guide and all, in seeking quiet life..

O wretched minds! there is no gold that may
Grant that ye seek! no war, no peace, no strife;

No! no! although thy head were hooped with gold,
Serjeant with mace, or halbert, sword nor knife,

Cannot repulse the care that follow should,”—p, 84, 85.

No.XVIII. VOL.III.-Aug. Rev.

2 E

The following simile is ingenious:

"From these high hills, as when a spring doth fall,

It trilleth down with still and subtle course;
Of this and that it gathers, aye and shall,

Till it have just flow'd off the stream and force;
Then at the foot it rageth over all.

So fareth love," &c.

p. 68.

His paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms is not very good; it is amply adorned with Petrarchan conceits. DANTE is the only poet who has caught the spirit of these compositions, and he is almost literal. WYATT's own Envoi is more poetical than his translation:

"As the servant in his master's face

Finding pardon of his pass'd offence,

Considering his great goodness and his grace,
Glad tears distils, as gladsome recompence;
Right so David, that seem'd in that place
A marble image of singular reverence
Carv'd in the rock, with eyes and hand on high,
Made as by craft to plain, to sob, to sigh.

This while a beam THAT BRIGHT SUN forth sends,
THAT SUN the which was never cloud could hide,
Pierceth the cave, and on the harp descends;
Whose glancing light the chords did over-glide,

And such lustre upon the harp extends,

As light of lamp upon the gold clean tried
The turn whereof into his eyes did start,

Surpris'd with joy by penance of the heart."-p. 116.

The measures in which he wrote are often exceedingly capricious and absurd; and, altogether, we should place him as far below his friend SURREY in taste, as in poetical genius.

His speech on the accusation of treason, preferred against him by the infamous BONNER, is strong and impassioned; and sometimes reminds us of the abrupt eloquence of some parts of the celebrated Oration de Signis.

"Here were a great matter to blear your eyes withal,' say my accusers, if you would believe Wyatt, that is not ashamed to lye so manifestly in judgment. Didst thou not send Mason unto him at Nice? Hast thou not confest it thyself? Hath not Mason confessed it? Hath not the Bishop of London and Haynes accused thee thereof?' Forsooth! never a whit. Neither sent I Mason, nor have confessed that, nor Mason so confesseth, nor, I suppose, neither of my accusers do so allege. Call forth Bonner and Haynes! Their spirituality letteth not them from judgment out of the king's court. Let them be sworn. Their saying is, that Mason spake with Pole at Genes. Here do they not accuse me; they accuse Mason. Call forth Mason! swear him. He is defendant; his oath cannot be taken. What saith he at the least? He saith that Bonner, Haynes, and Wyatt, being all three the king's ambassadors at Villa Franca, beside Nice, that same Wyatt being in great care for intelligence how the matters went, then in great closness (being an emperor, a French king, a bishop of Rome,

so nigh together, that all these lay within four miles, treating upon a conclusion of peace by the hands and means of the bishop of Rome, the king's mortal enemy, Pole also, his traitor, being there, practising against the king,) the said Wyatt, at a dinner, devised and asked, 'What if Mason did undermine Pole, to look if he could suck out any thing of him that were worth the king's knowledge?' which they all there thought good, and he accepted it when he should see his time. Doth Mason here accuse me? or confesseth that I sent him on a message? What word gave I unto thee, Mason? what message? I defy all familiarity and friendship betwixt us. Say thy worst. My accusers themselves are accused in this tale, as well as I, if this be treason; yea! and more.”—P. 289.

Here our observations on WYATT and SURREY must close: but we cannot conclude without glancing back to that sacred country, from which the streams of Poetry have descended to us. Before the study of the illustrious authors to whom we alluded at the commencement of this article, our poetry was rude and barbarous: unintelligible sermons upon Predestination, and other abstruse points, and indecent histories, the circumstances of which were dwelt upon with laudable minuteness, were mingled with tales of war or romance, and related in a spirit of mixed savageness and bigotry. But after CHAUCER arose, the character of our poetry was elevated. His genius was great and original, but the story of Cambuscan would in all probability have been untold, if his mind had not been imbued with the spirit of ARIOSTO. He set before his countrymen the example of drawing from the Italian sources, and the result was, that our own Poetry acquired added splendour, harmony, and strength.

When we now contemplate the melancholy decline of the country to which we have just alluded, it is impossible not to feel the same kind of emotions which enthusiastic minds experience in reflecting on the first fall of that magnificent Empire. It is no longer the seat of the Arts: it is their sepulchre. The Muse, too, has left this abode of superstition and slavery. It is a country where almost every one ought to be a poet, and there is none. We can scarcely except BETTINELLI. What M. GUINGUENE has said of the early Sicilian and Italian poets, may with far more truth be predicated of their living descendants: "Ils ont sous les yeux les mers et les volcané, une végétation abondante et variée, les majestueux et mélancoliques débris de l'antiquité, l'éclat d'un jour brûlant, des nuits fraiches et magnifiques; leur siècle est fécond en guerres, en révolutions, en faits d'armes; les mœurs de leurs temps provoquent les traits de la satire; et ils chantent comme au milieu d'un désert, ne peignent rien de ce qui les entoure; ne paraissent rien sentir, ni rien coir.'

With the crowd of modern poets, who have arisen "thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, we are little acquainted, and we have no wish to be more so. But it is the moral degradation of the people which is the cause of this total absence of inspiration. That country, which was "irriguous with the dews of heaven, when so much of the vicinage was dry;"* the country of Poets, of Patrons, and of Artists;-is fallen, like Greece, and like her, could not produce ten men of genius to save it from utter destruction. To Italy may be applied those words which M. Sismondi so eloquently uses in speaking of another nation, which, after being the centre of light to the world, is buried, like her, in the darkness of superstition; the virtues have departed with liberty; and both remain, shrouded in vice and ignorance, while the rest of the world pours out apon them the cruelty of derision:

"Ce n'est plus la qu'il faut chercher ni la renommée de leurs grands hommes, ni leurs écrits.

Et cependant ces contrées n'ont point été conquises; n'est point l'etranger qui les a depouillées de leurs richesses, qui a anéanti leur population, qui a détruit leurs lois, leurs mœurs, et leur esprit national. Le poison etait au-dedans d'elles, il s'est développé par lui-même, et il a tout anéanti."†

We return to Dr. NOTT. His labours have been enthusiastic, but they were not required. There are many of our early poets who are more worthy of Dr. Norr's profuse praises, and who would have been more interesting to English readers, than inditers of amorous verses to children at nurse. BARBOUR, or LYDGATE, or SKELTON, are much more fit writers to exercise the learning and the ingenuity of an editor. Dr. NOTT, however, has executed his task, upon the whole, in a respectable manner; but he has a vehement predilection for truisms, and a certain ostentatious manner of quoting common-place scraps of Latin to express what might have been at least as forcibly, and rather more intelligibly, said in English. He has given us, too, some pieces from Garcilaso and Lope de la Vega, for no other purpose that we can discover, than to shew his learning; since he acknowledges that he thinks it improbable that SURREY ever borrowed from them,-and Surrey borrowed from all that he read. Dr. NOTT's style is, in general, plain and correct: but he is not always contented with this praise: he some* Jeremy Taylor. + De la littérature des Arabes.

times rises to a kind of middling poetry, and, in the fury for fine writing, and in the fervour of pseudo-inspiration, he boldly oversteps all those limits within which those who are merely good writers have intrenched themselves. Thus:

"He (Mr. Mathias) has awakened us to a just notion of the value of the Italian poets, and from him we have learnt that Italian poetry is not a little purling rill, which bathes a few fragrant flowers in the verdant meads through which it strays, but a mighty flood, copious, deep, majestic, flowing on in a full tide of grandeur, and opposing itself in proud rivalry to the loftiest efforts of the Greek and Roman masters themselves, from whom, as from the great deep, all other streams derive their source," &c. &c. &c.P. cclxxvi, cclxxvii.

This is very fine: to be sure, he speaks in one place of the Greek and Roman masters, from whom all other streams derive their source, and other things, which cause some little confusion of metaphor; but, upon the whole, we believe our readers will agree with us, that it is a very magnificent specimen of Dr. NOTT's intrepidity. There are a few other flowers of the same kind: but we cannot stop to gather them. We give DR. NOTT ample credit for his enthusiasm and laboriousness, and for the amabilis insania by which he says he is possessed: we can listen with some patience to his long stories about the poems which perhaps' supplied the place of Le Astuzie and other interesting operas to the finical ladies and gentlemen of that day: we can do all this, and more-but we cannot patiently permit him to canonize his SURREY and WYATT, in contempt of more ancient and more venerable names.

If there were any hope, in this quarto-making age, that we should be attended to, we would hint to DR. NOTT, that if he resolves to be an editor, he should not take his example from the huge and sepulchral literary pyramids of the TODDS and the MITFORDS and the WEBERS; but from the unpretending volumes of MR. ELLIS, RITSON'S Minot, or WAY's Fabliaux.