suasively and skilfully; in stating his case with plausible art; and in calculating the arguments and allusions which were likely to win over his audience. No one ever surpassed him in laying down difficult and abstract principles, and clothing them in apt and polished language; and his narrative powers were quite wonderful,-his statements moving onward with a grace and beauty, not unfrequently with a spirit and animation, which reminds us of the ease and power of Livy or M. Froude. In reasoning he was rather dexterous than strong; but no one could handle an argument more convincingly, or refute an opponent with greater felicity; while in plying the light weapons of wit and raillery, and in flashing over the subject the radiance of illustration, he was not approached by any speaker. In close and fierce encounters he was somewhat wanting; and perhaps a deficiency of earnestness and simplicity may be traced in his rounded and musical periods. No doubt Pitt surpassed him in lofty declamation, Fox in impassioned and fervid reasoning Burke in profound philosophic_exposition; and, among the orators of our time, the onset of Lord Derby is more vigorous, and the subtlety of Gladstone more amazing. But if we take the definition of Tacitus-" is est orator, qui de omni quæstione pulchré et ornaté, et ad persuadendum apté, dicere, pro dignitate rerum, ad utilitatem temporum, cum voluptate audientium possit"-as a canon to judge of English orators, we shall award to Canning the highest praise of any Parliamentary speaker of his time, for no other speeches were so uniformly effective and telling. As a statesman, he will not rank with the Chathams, the Pitts, the Walpoles, and the Peels, for he never had the ascendancy they possessed; and his name is not associated with any great military successes, with any long and powerful dictatorship, with any triumphant maintenance of a dynasty, or with any glorious experiment of social amelioration. But his foreign policy from 1808 to 1809, and again from 1822 to 1827, showed that he had a just conception of the destiny of England, that he could shape the means in his hands to great ends, and that he could seize the fitting opportunities to accomplish bold and original designs. As regards domestic affairs, he evinced less wisdom and forethought; and having been badly brought up with reference to them, he perhaps never thoroughly understood them. As an administrator, he was bold, ready, and indefatigable, and had the almost inestimable faculty of finding out ability at once, and of seeing through equivocation and deception. On the whole, if not one of the most celebrated of our statesmen, he certainly was among the greatest, if genius, skill, vigour, and resolution, accompanied with splendid gifts of eloquence, are the true requisites for this character. ART. III.-1. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect; with a Dissertation and Glossary. By WILLIAM BARNES. Second Edition. London, 1847. 8vo. 2. Hwomely Rhymes. A Second Collection of Poems in the Dorset Dialect. By WILLIAM BARNES. London, 1859. 8vo. 3. The Burns Centenary Poems. A Collection of Fifty of the Best out of many Hundreds written on occasion of the Centenary Celebration. Selected and Edited by GEORGE ANDERSON and JOHN FINLAY. Glasgow, 1859. 8vo. MR WILLIAM BARNES is a Dorsetshire clergyman, who appears to consider that his forte lies in philology and antiquarianism, and to be endowed with a naive ignorance of the fact that he is one of our very first poets. To this ignorance we perhaps owe no small part of the singular charm which delights us in his writings. There is no other living writer in whom an equal amount of artistic faculty is combined with so great a freedom from all species of artifice. At the risk of debauching this simplicity of mind in the poet, we feel bound as critics to do our best towards preventing our readers from remaining in a similar ignorance of the value of his poetry. Are "Quarterly Reviewers" always to follow the lead of the popular cry, and the voices of the minor periodicals, instead of boldly assuming the responsibility of being themselves leaders of literary opinion? We have more than once shown that such is not our view of our duties. now speak our mind about Mr Barnes just as openly as if his poetry had already attained that popular admiration to which our readers, before they shall have finished this article, will agree with us that it is surely destined. We The honour and pleasure of being probably the first to introduce the poetry of Mr Barnes to the notice of the majority of our readers, would certainly not have devolved upon us at this time of day, and after much of that poetry has been already many years before the world, were it not for one or two circumstances, which it seems necessary to point out, in order to account for the hitherto limited audience obtained by the Dorsetshire poet. The fact that the poems are composed in a dialect which, however simply and "phonetically" spelt, must still offer a slight difficulty, at the outset, to their comprehension, would alone go far towards explaining the little notice which Mr Barnes has hitherto obtained from the public. But the poet, until the appearance of his last volume, which is only just out, and which is comparatively easy to read, has done his very best to aggravate this obstacle to his reputation. For example, because the Dor set dialect is more nearly allied to the ancient Anglo-Saxon than our present ordinary language is, Mr Barnes has thought proper to assimilate his orthography to the Anglo-Saxon so far as to employ the Anglo-Saxon sign for the th, with the result that, to the ordinary reader, the first glance at one of his pages is fatal to any further attempt. This, and other antiquarian selfindulgences, Mr Barnes has most wisely denied himself in his new volume; and the consequence already is, that his name has, in a few months, established itself in the most select private literary circles, as that of a first-rate poet. In this last volume, which is called "Hwomely Rhymes," the dialect, after half-anhour's acquaintance with it, is nothing but an additional charm. For, not to speak of the pleasing freshness and mental excitement which accompany the perusal of even ordinary ideas and descriptions in a language or dialect to which we are comparatively unused, there is a real poetic superiority in the dialect of the south-western counties of England, for subjects of a simple rural character, which fully justifies Mr Barnes in his admiration and adoption of this form of English. Mr Barnes has intensified, in his earlier volume, the above causes of unpopularity by giving that publication a distinctly and avowedly antiquarian air. The publisher, Mr John Russell Smith, is an antiquarian publisher; and before the reader is allowed a sip of the "pure well of Dorset undefiled," he is expected to wade through fifty pages of dry philological dissertation. We have said enough to explain, though not to justify, the people's hitherto neglect of so remarkable a poet as we shall now show Mr Barnes to be. We cannot, in few words, express the general character of this gentleman's poetry better than by saying that it combines, in a high degree, the special merits of Wordsworth and Burns, but in a way which is so perfectly original as to bear no trace of even a perusal of those poets by the author. Indeed, we have never before read verses of which it was so hard to trace the artistic pedigree. But for that fulness of artistic beauty which seems never to have been attained at a leap and without precedent, we should say that all Mr Barnes' poetry might have been written by him had no other poet ever lived. There is, however, no oddity or straining after originality. Nothing can be more simple, straightforward, and unaffected. These verses are down to the comprehension of the simplest rustic, and up to the requirements of the most fastidious and novelty-seeking critic. Let us hear the writer's own account of his purpose in writing: "The author thinks his readers will find his poems free of slang and vice, as they are written from the associations of an early youth that was passed among rural families in a secluded part of the country, upon whose sound Christian principles, kindness, and harmless cheerfulness, he can still think with complacency; and he hopes that if his little work should fall into the hands of a reader of that class in whose language it is written, it would not be likely to damp his love of God, or slacken the tone of his moral sentiment, or lower the dignity of his selfesteem; as his intention is not to show up the simplicity of rural life as an object of sport, but to utter the happy emotions with which the mind can, and he thinks should, contemplate the charms of rural nature, and the better feelings and more harmless joys of the families of the small farm-house and happy cottage. As he has not written for readers who have had their lots cast in town occupations of a highly civilised community, and cannot sympathise with the rustic mind, he can hardly hope that they will understand either his poems or his intention; since, with the not uncommon notion that every change from the plough towards the desk, or from the desk towards the couch of empty-handed idleness, is an onward step towards happiness and intellectual and moral excellence, they will most likely find it very hard to conceive that wisdom and goodness would be found speaking in a dialect that may seem to them a fit vehicle only for the animal wants and passions of a boor. The author, however, is not ashamed to say, that after reading some of the best compositions of many of the most polished languages, he can contemplate its pure and strong Saxon features with perfect satisfaction, and has often found the simple truths enunciated in the pithy sentences of village patriarchs only expanded by the weaker wordiness of modern composition into high-sounding paragraphs." Mr Barnes, in his first volume, fulfilled the essentials of the kind of popularity he here professes to seek, as completely as he succeeded in nullifying those essentials by the outward conditions of which we have complained. We take the liberty of earnestly urging upon him the propriety, in future editions of his first collection, of popularising his orthography to an even greater extent than he has done in the "Hwomely Rhymes;" for he has no right to do anything that unnecessarily limits poetry of such universal interest and application to a local audience. The tender and profound reflective element in Mr Barnes' poetry, which detects moral beauty in unsuspected places, and expresses it in a way to touch all hearts, is well illustrated by the conclusion of the following little poem, called "Readen ov a head-stone." It will remind our readers at once of Wordsworth's famous "We are seven," to which it is scarcely, if at all, inferior either in beauty or originality. As I wer readen ov a stwone To tell how much 'e lov'd her. The vess wer very good, but shart, At Betty White's, o' other zide O' road." "Mid He, my chile," I cried, An' keep, and lead, and love thee." When they be dead that lov'd it. How admirable is this discovery and poetical expression of a beneficent law of our nature, in what would have appeared to a vulgar writer nothing but childish fickleness and poverty of affection! Mr Barnes is the best writer of rustic eclogues since Theocritus. His pieces in this kind are almost too exquisite in their artistic simplicity and truthfulness to be widely appreciated at once. The following, called "Father come huome," is only an average specimen of many gems of the same kind in Mr Barnes' volumes : CHILE. Oh mother, mother! be the tiaties done? |