Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes by R. Brimley Johnson. Various

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      The Lay of the Laureate. Carmen Nuptiale. By ROBERT SOUTHEY, Esq., Poet Laureate, &c., &c. 12mo. pp. 78. London, 1816.

      A poet laureate, we take it, is naturally a ridiculous person: and has scarcely any safe course to follow, in times like the present, but to bear his faculties with exceeding meekness, and to keep as much as possible in the shade. A stipendiary officer of the Royal household, bound to produce two lyrical compositions ever year, in praise of his Majesty's person and government, is undoubtedly an object which it is difficult to contemplate with gravity; and which can only have been retained in existence, from that love of antique pomp and establishment which has embellished our Court with so many gold-sticks and white rods, and such trains of beef-eaters and grooms of the stole—though it has submitted to the suppression of the more sprightly appendages of a king's fool, or a court jester. That the household poet should have survived the other wits of the establishment, can only be explained by the circumstance of his office being more easily converted into one of mere pomp and ceremony, and coming thus to afford an antient and well-sounding name for a moderate sinecure. For more than a century, accordingly, it has existed on this footing; and its duties, like those of the other personages to whom we have just alluded, have been discharged with a decorous gravity and unobtrusive quietness, which has provoked no derision, merely because it has attracted no notice.

      The present possessor, however, appears to have other notions on the subject; and has very distinctly manifested his resolution not to rest satisfied with the salary, sherry, and safe obscurity of his predecessors, but to claim a real power and prerogative in the world of letters, in virtue of his title and appointment. Now, in this, we conceive, with all due humility, that there is a little mistake of fact, and a little error of judgment. The laurel which the King gives, we are credibly informed, has nothing at all in common with that which is bestowed by the Muses; and the Prince Regent's warrant is absolutely of no authority in the court of Apollo. If this be the case, however, it follows, that a poet laureate has no sort of precedency among poets—whatever may be his place among pages and clerks of the kitchen;—and that he has no more pretensions as an author, than if his appointment had been to the mastership of the stag-hounds. When he takes state upon him with the public, therefore, in consequence of his office, he really is guilty of as ludicrous a blunder as the worthy American Consul, in one of the Hanse towns, who painted the Roman fasces on the pannel of his buggy, and insisted upon calling his foot-boy and clerk his lictors. Except when he is in his official duty, therefore, the King's house-poet would do well to keep the nature of his office out of sight; and, when he is compelled to appear in it in public, should try to get through with the business as quickly and quietly as possible. The brawny drayman who enacts the Champion of England in the Lord Mayor's show, is in some danger of being sneered at by the spectators, even when he paces along with the timidity and sobriety that becomes his condition; but if he were to take it into his head to make serious boast of his prowess, and to call upon the city bards to celebrate his heroic acts, the very apprentices could not restrain their laughter—and "the humorous man" would have but small chance of finishing his part in peace.

      Mr. Southey could not be ignorant of all this; and yet it appears that he could not have known it all. He must have been conscious, we think, of the ridicule attached to his office, and might have known that there were only two ways of counteracting it—either by sinking the office altogether in his public appearances, or by writing such very good verses in the discharge of it, as might defy ridicule, and render neglect impossible. Instead of this, however, he has allowed himself to write rather worse than any Laureate before him, and has betaken himself to the luckless and vulgar expedient of endeavouring to face out the thing by an air of prodigious confidence and assumption:—and has had the usual fortune of such undertakers, by becoming only more conspicuously ridiculous. The badness of his official productions indeed is something really wonderful—though not more so than the amazing self-complacency and self-praise with which they are given to the world. With the finest themes in the world for that sort of writing, they are the dullest, tamest, and most tedious things ever poor critic was condemned, or other people vainly invited, to read. They are a great deal more wearisome, and rather more unmeaning and unnatural, than the effusions of his predecessors, Messrs. Pye and Whitehead; and are moreover disfigured with the most abominable egotism, conceit and dogmatism, than we ever met with in any thing intended for the public eye. They are filled, indeed, with praises of the author himself, and his works, and his laurel, and his dispositions; notices of his various virtues and studies; puffs of the productions he is preparing for the press, and anticipations of the fame which he is to reap by their means, from a less ungrateful age; and all this delivered with such an oracular seriousness and assurance, that it is easy to see the worthy Laureate thinks himself entitled to share in the prerogatives of that royalty which he is bound to extol, and has resolved to make it

      —his great example as it is his theme.

      For, as sovereign Princes are permitted, in their manifestoes and proclamations, to speak of their own gracious pleasure and royal wisdom, without imputation of arrogance, so, our Laureate has persuaded himself that he may address the subject world in the same lofty strains, and that they will listen with as dutiful an awe to the authoritative exposition of his own genius and glory. What might have been the success of the experiment, if the execution had been as masterly as the design is bold, we shall not trouble ourselves to conjecture; but the contrast between the greatness of the praise and the badness of the poetry in which it is conveyed, and to which it is partly applied, is abundantly decisive of its result in the present instance, as well as in all the others in which the ingenious author has adopted the same style. We took some notice of the Carmen Triumphale, which stood at the head of the series. But of the Odes which afterwards followed to the Prince Regent, and the Sovereigns and Generals who came to visit him, we had the charity to say nothing; and were willing indeed to hope, that the lamentable failure of that attempt might admonish the author, at least as effectually as any intimations of ours. Here, however, we have him again, with a Lay of the Laureate, and a Carmen Nuptiale, if possible still more boastful and more dull than any of his other celebrations. It is necessary, therefore, to bring the case once more before the Public, for the sake both of correction and example; and as the work is not likely to find many readers, and is of a tenor which would not be readily believed upon any general representation, we must now beg leave to give a faithful analysis of its different parts, with a few specimens of the taste and manner of its execution.

      Its object is to commemorate the late auspicious marriage of the presumptive Heiress of the English crown with the young Prince of Saxe-Cobourg; and consists of a Proem, a Dream, and an Epilogue—with a L'envoy, and various annotations. The Proem, as was most fitting, is entirely devoted to the praise of the Laureate himself; and contains an account, which cannot fail to be very interesting, both to his Royal auditors and to the world at large, of his early studies and attainments—the excellence of his genius—the nobleness of his views—and the happiness that has been the result of these precious gifts. Then there is mention made of his pleasure in being appointed Poet Laureate, and of the rage and envy which that event excited in all the habitations of the malignant. This is naturally followed up by a full account of all his official productions, and some modest doubts whether his genius is not too heroic and pathetic for the composition of an Epithalamium,—which doubts, however, are speedily and pleasingly resolved by the recollection, that as Spenser made a hymn on his own marriage, so, there can be nothing improper in Mr. Southey doing as much on that of the Princess Charlotte. This is the general argument of the Proem. But the reader must know a little more of the details. In his early youth, the ingenious author says he aspired to the fame of a poet; and then Fancy came to him, and showed him the glories of his future career, addressing him in these encouraging words—

      Thou whom rich Nature at thy happy birth

       Blest in her bounty with the largest dower

       That Heaven indulges to a child of earth!

      Being fully persuaded of СКАЧАТЬ