" the barbarous hordes of Africa, the bond and the free in the remotest regions of the earth, when its contents are eagerly read by the natives of those beautiful isles amid the southern ocean, beneath their, waving groves of cocoa, and bread-fruit trees, by the civilized Bramin amid his fragrant arcade of orange blossoms and wild figs, by the Georgian on his lofty and rugged mountains, which the ancient Roman in the height of his glory could not subdue ; by the dwellers on the shores of the Caspian, and by the inhabitants of the rich islands that gem the Indian seas, are we now to be told that the modern muse, who presumes to haunt the hallowed groves of Zion's hill instead of the pagan shades of Citheron and Aonia, and neglecting the muddy and polluted streams of Hippocrene and Castalius, quaffs at the nectareous and truly inspiring fount of Shiloa, is ill adapted to please the taste of the present day, which is wearied and nauseated with Scriptural subjects?, Yet such is the ridiculous cant of criticism, and such the opinion of some of the liberal fraternity of booksellers. Should this work be fairly brought before the public, it will then appear whether the enlightened world be “weary of scriptural subjects," to use the words of a celebrated clerical poet respecting The Royal Minstrel, or not; and if I have ill timed the following scenes, written with a design to improve the taste, diffuse instruction, and win to a perusal of those great originals from whence they have been drawn the young and rising generation, for whom this work is principally composed. But that this volume will be fairly brought before the world, or that publicity given to it which the poetical effusions of other authors, good, bad, and indifferent, have constantly enjoyed, I despair of altotogether. For while the professedly religious Reviews and Magazines, as well as the literary and the gay, have by all the ways and means in their power given to blasphemous and licentious works the greatest notoriety they could possibly bestow, by again and again dragging them and their worthless authors from that obscurity and neglect, into which they had otherwise speedily fallen, before the public, The Royal Minstrel, an epic founded on one of the most sublime and interesting portions of Sacred History, has been scornfully passed by as totally unworthy to find a place in their luminous pages. The Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the Monthly, the British, nay the whole circle of Reviews and host of Magazines,—with the exception, and that only as far as regards my last poem, of some few of the minor periodicals, have shut me entirely from their pages, and although warmly solicited by many respectable friends from various quarters, never condescending to notice any of the productions that have, alas! for me, untimely fallen from my pen. I have greater reason than Milton to exclaim, "I am fallen on evil times," for I have never offended against Church or State; yet had I been born in the most barbarous ages of darkness and ignorance, instead of the present boasted era of light, liberality, and learning, I could not have suffered more from cruel neglect and unfeeling apathy. It will be for other and more liberal days, when this heart shall long have ceased to throb with the disappointment of all its hopes, to judge if I have merited such chilling treatment from these self-boasted fosterers of rising merit and genius. གས 3. Mr. Percival, Stockdale, in his introduction to the poems of S. M. Oram, has given us a true and just picture of the melancholy fate of genius, unaided by opulence and power. I shall quote his words. "In these times many facts, which are much to be regretted, preclude our love and esteem of true poetry, when it is not recommended and supported by adventitious and fortunate circumstances. The radical evil, the source of all that is hostile to true genius, is our extreme luxury, licentiousness, and dissipation: for the warping of reason, the depravation of taste is one of the constant temporal judgments of heaven on a general and great corruption of manners. Intellectual " vassals and automata that we are! We now read, criticise, censure, and admire, as we have taken the watch-word from those who dress better and live more elegantly than ourselves: and they too have caught the parole from some powerful, unreflecting, and arbitrary general, the decisive champion of our factitious muses. Hence, if a man of talents is likewise (though not without some incongruity) a man of fashion, he no sooner publishes, than the signal is given from some commanding ground, and his works fly rapidly through the island; venal and servile reviewers vie with each other to give relief to his most uninteresting passages;— in short, his emoluments and his encomiums are even greater than he deserves. At this era of weak prejudices and of vitiated taste, what has the man of true genius to expect, who in his literary course has always been impelled by sincerity; who has always, on important subjects, produced his genuine sentiments to the world, sentiments which might have been salutary to the public, but which were unavoidably disadvantageous to himself? "What must he expect who nobly disdains any sordid homage to his natural inferiors; properly concious as he is, or ought to be, of those faculties which God seldom, and which man never bestows! He must expect that every envious and malignant machination will be exerted to check his success and his fame; he must fortify himself with the independence of his own mind; or he must be a slave to the inflexibility of trade, which, in all commercial dealings, only considers its own interest. Ill-fated merit! to be thrown into times in which the bad heart will not, and the good heart cannot distinguish.” |