never known any one who fell in, at the first trial, with the proper rhyme and cadence of the pervigilium Veneris, or the choral lyrics of the Greek dramatists.  The difficulty, however, is virtually the same, as to every new combination; and it is an unsurmountable difficulty, where such new combinations are not repeated with any degree of uniformity, but are multiplied, through the whole composition, with an unbounded licence of variation.  Such, however, is confessedly the case with the work before us; and it really seems unnecessary to make any other remark on its versification.

The author, however, entertains a different opinion of it.  So far from apprehending that it may cost his readers some trouble to convince themselves that the greater part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures.  “One advantage,” says Mr. Southey, “this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord:  he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible.”  We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey is aware of.

* * * * *

The subject of this poem is almost as ill chosen as the diction; and the conduct of the fable as disorderly as the versification.  The corporation of magicians, that inhabit “the Domdaniel caverns, under the roots of the ocean,” had discovered, that a terrible destroyer was likely to rise up against them from the seed of Hodeirah, a worthy Arab, with eight fine children.  Immediately the murder of all those innocents is resolved on; and a sturdy assassin sent with instructions to destroy the whole family (as Mr. Southey has it) “root and branch.”  The good man, accordingly, and seven of his children, are dispatched; but a cloud comes over the mother and the remaining child; and the poem opens with the picture of the widow and her orphan wandering, by night, over the desarts of Arabia.  The old lady, indeed, might as well have fallen under the dagger of the Domdanielite; for she dies, without doing anything for her child, in the end of the first book; and little Thalaba is left crying in the wilderness.  Here he is picked up by a good old Arab, who takes him home, and educates him like a pious mussulman; and he and the old man’s daughter fall in love with each other, according to the invariable custom in all such cases.  The magicians, in the meantime, are hunting him over the face of the whole earth; and one of them gets near enough to draw his dagger to stab him, when a providential simoom lays him dead on the sand.  From the dead sorcerer’s finger, Thalaba takes a ring, inscribed with some unintelligible characters, which he is enabled to interpret by the help of some other unintelligible characters that he finds on the forehead of a locust; and soon after takes advantage of an eclipse of the