After all, it must be admitted, that there is a class of persons (we are afraid they cannot be called readers), to whom the representation of vulgar manners, in vulgar language, will afford much entertainment.  We are afraid, however, that the ingenious writers who supply the hawkers and ballad-singers, have very nearly monopolised that department, and are probably better qualified to hit the taste of their customers, than Mr. Southey, or any of his brethren, can yet pretend to be.  To fit them for the higher task of original composition, it would not be amiss if they were to undertake a translation of Pope or Milton into the vulgar tongue, for the benefit of those children of nature.

There is another disagreeable effect of this affected simplicity, which, though of less importance than those which have been already noticed, it may yet be worth while to mention:  This is, the extreme difficulty of supporting the same low tone of expression throughout, and the inequality that is consequently introduced into the texture of the composition.  To an author of reading and education, it is a style that must always be assumed and unnatural, and one from which he will be perpetually tempted to deviate.  He will rise, therefore, every now and then, above the level to which he has professedly degraded himself; and make amends for that transgression, by a fresh effort of descension.  His composition, in short, will be like that of a person who is attempting to speak in an obsolete or provincial dialect; he will betray himself by expressions of occasional purity and elegance, and exert himself to efface that impression, by passages of unnatural meanness or absurdity.

In making these strictures on the perverted taste for simplicity, that seems to distinguish our modern school of poetry, we have no particular allusion to Mr. Southey, or the production now before us:  On the contrary, he appears to us, to be less addicted to this fault than most of his fraternity; and if we were in want of examples to illustrate the preceding observations, we should certainly look for them in the effusions of that poet who commemorates, with so much effect, the chattering of Harry Gill’s teeth, tells the tale of the one-eyed huntsman “who had a cheek like a cherry,” and beautifully warns his studious friend of the risk he ran of “growing double.”

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The style of our modern poets, is that, no doubt, by which they are most easily distinguished:  but their genius has also an internal character; and the peculiarities of their taste may be discovered, without the assistance of their diction.  Next after great familiarity of language, there is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought.  There must be nothing moderate, natural, or easy, about their sentiments.  There must be a “qu’il mourut,” and a “let there be light,” in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their