of pleasure.  The interest is not dramatic, but melo-dramatic—­it is a mixture of painting, poetry, and music, of the natural and preternatural, of obvious sentiment and romantic costume.  A rose is a Gul, a nightingale a Bulbul.  We might fancy ourselves in an eastern harem, amidst Ottomans, and otto of roses, and veils and spangles, and marble pillars, and cool fountains, and Arab maids and Genii, and magicians, and Peris, and cherubs, and what not?  Mr. Moore has a little mistaken the art of poetry for the cosmetic art.  He does not compose an historic group, or work out a single figure; but throws a variety of elementary sensations, of vivid impressions together, and calls it a description.  He makes out an inventory of beauty—­the smile on the lips, the dimple on the cheeks, item, golden locks, item, a pair of blue wings, item, a silver sound, with breathing fragrance and radiant light, and thinks it a character or a story.  He gets together a number of fine things and fine names, and thinks that, flung on heaps, they make up a fine poem.  This dissipated, fulsome, painted, patch-work style may succeed in the levity and languor of the boudoir, or might have been adapted to the Pavilions of royalty, but it is not the style of Parnassus, nor a passport to Immortality.  It is not the taste of the ancients, “’tis not classical lore”—­nor the fashion of Tibullus, or Theocritus, or Anacreon, or Virgil, or Ariosto, or Pope, or Byron, or any great writer among the living or the dead, but it is the style of our English Anacreon, and it is (or was) the fashion of the day!  Let one example (and that an admired one) taken from Lalla Rookh, suffice to explain the mystery and soften the harshness of the foregoing criticism.

  “Now upon Syria’s land of roses
  Softly the light of eve reposes,
  And like a glory, the broad sun
  Hangs over sainted Lebanon: 
  Whose head in wintry grandeur towers,
  And whitens with eternal sleet,
  While summer, in a vale of flowers,
  Is sleeping rosy at his feet. 
  To one who look’d from upper air,
  O’er all th’ enchanted regions there,
  How beauteous must have been the glow,
  The life, the sparkling from below! 
  Fair gardens, shining streams, with ranks
  Of golden melons on their banks,
  More golden where the sun-light falls,—­
  Gay lizards, glittering on the walls
  Of ruin’d shrines, busy and bright
  As they were all alive with light;—­
  And yet more splendid, numerous flocks
  Of pigeons, settling on the rocks,
  With their rich, restless wings, that gleam
  Variously in the crimson beam
  Of the warm west, as if inlaid
  With brilliants from the mine, or made
  Of tearless rainbows, such as span
  The unclouded skies of Peristan! 
  And then, the mingling sounds that come
  Of shepherd’s ancient reed, with hum
  Of the wild bees of Palestine,
  Banquetting through the flowery vales—­
  And, Jordan, those sweet banks of thine,
  And woods, so full of nightingales.”—­