commendation not to be rejected, (for it is well known that that country hath afforded many rare and admirable wits,) yet it is not the highest that can be given him; for should I affirm that neither Tasso nor Guarini, nor any of the most neat and refined spirits of Italy, nor even the choicest of our English poets, can challenge to themselves any advantages above him, it could not be judged any attribute superior to what he deserves.” But these sentiments are evidently the original and exclusive property of Phillips himself; for it is not to be credited that Milton, however he may have recognised the real merits of Drummond, would have sanctioned such extravagant commendation. Thomas Campbell is very indignant at the comparison of Drummond with Tasso; though Mr. Pinkerton, the “modern writer" to whom he alludes in his "Specimens of the British Poets," is scarcely less laudatory than Phillips. "If any poems," observes Mr. Pinkerton, "possess a very high degree of that exquisite Doric delicacy which we so much admire in Comus, &c., those of Drummond do. Milton may often be traced in him; and he had certainly read and admired him. And if he had not read Drummond, perhaps we should never have seen the delicacies of Comus, Lycidas, Il Penseroso, and L'Allegro.” “ Perhaps," says Campbell," is an excellent leading-string for weak assertions ;" and he insists upon it that only one or two epithets of Drummond may be recognized in Milton. Campbell seems to be almost as ill-disposed towards poor Drummond as Gifford himself, though from a very different cause. Gifford's anger is an editorial weakness. He regards every attack upon the poet whom he has undertaken to illustrate, as a personal concern of his own. He confounds himself with his author. Campbell, I suspect, is influenced by two circumstances,-first, his aversion to Drummond's Tory politics; and secondly, a want of respect for the poet's favourite form of composition-the sonnet. He sneers at Drummond's grief for the death of Charles the First, and describes his Lives of the James's of Scotland" as a work abounding in false eloquence and slavish principles. I am not " disposed to say a word in favour of Drummond's politics, which have nothing whatever to do with his poetical genius; nor to defend his historical work, which indeed I never read: but it is a curious fact worth noticing, that though now utterly forgotten, it had once its enthusiastic admirers. Horace Walpole describes Drummond as " one of the best modern historians, and no mean imitator of Livy." There are certainly passages in Drummond's poetry, the style and tone of which seem to have suggested some of the poetry of Milton, who, though he did not perhaps rate Drummond so highly as some have done, appears to have read him with attention and delight. There is an Italian air in much of the poetry of Drummond that would naturally be pleasing to an Italian scholar like Milton. Dr. Symmons, in speaking of the poet of Hawthornden as the earliest writer of the true Sonnet, observes that he was "the peculiar object of Milton's applause and imitation." The author of Paradise Lost, however, in no instance condescended to become an imitator in which he did not immeasurably excel his models. His feeling for the beautiful and the true was so generous and ardent, that he would recognize merit even in less worthy pages than those of Drummond; but he invested the thoughts of others with the light of his own master-spirit, and gave them a glory which belonged originally to himself. Drummond has not been imitated by Milton alone. The comparative obscurity into which he has fallen, and the undeniable beauty of his productions, have tempted many modern authors to rifle his poetic treasures. Pope has not only stolen his thoughts, but imitated his versification. In his Eloisa to Abelard is the following line: "The crime was common, common be the pain." This is a very close imitation of the first line of one of Drummond's sonnets: "The grief was common, common were the cries." I shall give but one more example, though I could easily multiply such evidences of Pope's debt to Drummond. "To virgins, flowers; to sunburnt earth, the rain; To mariners, fair winds amidst the main ; "Not bubbling fountains to the thirsty swain, Pope's Pastorals. Drummond's Fourth Feasting. Gray also seems to have read and imitated him. "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." Drummond. Gray's Elegy. It was Drummond's poem of Fourth Feasting of which Ben Jonson envied him the authorship. It is not, however, his miscellaneous poems which are now the most admired. In these he has many superiors, but there are few early writers of the AngloItalian sonnet who may be compared with him in that particular class of composition. With the exception of the illegitimate couplet close, the disposition of the rhymes is after the strict Italian model. Though quite Petrarchan in their tone, they also occasionally evince the author's admiration of the style of his English predecessors and contemporaries. It is certain that he was familiar with the Sonnets of Shakespeare; for in his list of books read by him in 1606 he gives the "Passionate Pilgrim," which was the title of our great Dramatic Bard's first collection of sonnets. This was no doubt the surreptitious edition published by Jaggard in 1599. The Rev. Alexander Dyce, in his Aldine edition of Shakespeare's poems, erroneously asserts that they were first printed in 1609. Drummond's sonnets are superior to Shakespeare's as sonnets, however inferior to them as poems: that is to say, they are more rigidly constructed according to the laws of the sonnet, and have more unity and point, and are altogether better finished; but they have less richness and originality of thought, and comparatively few of those bold felicities of expression in which Shakespeare surpasses all other poets. Considered merely as sonnets, they are almost equal to those of Milton and of Wordsworth; but they have neither the sublime energy of the one, nor the profound sentiment of the other. Nor are they, indeed, so strictly legitimate in the disposition of rhymes. But in grace, ingenuity, delicacy, and tenderness, they are not surpassed by any sonnets in the language. Drummond may justly be styled the British Petrarch. Not only in his sonnets, but in many of his smaller pieces in different forms of verse, his style is quite Petrarchan. They read like free translations from the Italian. It is much to be regretted that Drummond did not regularly translate the whole of Petrarch's sonnets. No British poet could have done them more justice. Mr. Campbell would say that we have sonnets enough already in the English language; and as far as their number only is referred to, I should agree with him; but this elegant exotic has perhaps not yet been brought to perfection in our own country, and both its intrinsic merits and the labors of its cultivators have been often very unfairly treated by the critics, notwithstanding the authority in its favor of such names as Shakespeare, Drummond, Milton, and Wordsworth. The old comparison of the sonnet to the bed of Procrustes, was, if I mistake not, first used by Ben Jonson, and it has been regularly repeated by every opponent of the sonnet since his time. The objection to its limits has been successfully answered by an explanation that it equally applies to all other forms of verse. There must be a limit of some kind or other; and it would be difficult to give a reason why Spenser's favorite stanza is restricted to nine lines that would not be equally cogent in defence of Petrarch's stanza of fourteen. A sonnet does not necessarily stand alone any more than a Spenserian stanza, and a long poem may be constructed of the one as well as of the other. It has been found, indeed, that the sonnet on account of its greater length may be more easily rendered independent and complete in itself than the Spenserian stanza, which, however, is subjected to much the same rules. The sense ought to conclude with the last line, which should wind up with point, emphasis, and fulness. A fresh subject cannot properly be introduced into the middle of it. It is the opinion of the Italian critics, that a single sentiment or emotion may be more happily developed in a sonnet than in any other form of verse: and it seems as if its limits were particularly well calculated for the purpose. If it were longer, the leading idea would be weakened by too much diffusion; and if it were shorter, there might be too much compression and a consequent failure in point of perspicuity and completeness. The Sonnet was very popular in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and subsequently in that of Elizabeth. Our poetry owes this form of verse to Italy, to whom England was indebted, so early as the time of Edward the Third, for many other elegant additions to her literature. Chaucer borrowed largely from Bocaccio, who has been rather impudently pillaged by the majority of our story-tellers in metre. Petrarch was not much imitated by our poets before the time of Wyatt and Surrey, who made the sonnet fashionable. Though Shakespeare is not supposed to have been an Italian scholar, it is certain that he made very free use in his plays of the plots of many Italian novels, of which rude translations into English were abundant. His own sonnets, however, are not of an Italian cast. When the passion for Italian poetry declined, and with Charles the Second came in a taste for the wits of France, the Sonnet was almost abandoned, and so late as the time of Dr. Johnson it was spoken of with great contempt. Johnson himself, in noticing Milton, paid his own language so bad a compliment as to suppose that it was utterly impossible to |
