breasts,
  Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
  To their spirit’s perch, their being’s high account,
  Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones—­
  Amid the fierce intoxicating tones. 
  Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums,
  And sudden cannon.  Ah! how all this hums,
  In wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone—­
  Like thunder clouds that spake to Babylon,
  And set those old Chaldeans to their tasks.—­
  Are then regalities all gilded masks?

And now, good-morrow to “the Muses’ son of Promise”; as for “the feats he yet may do,” as we do not pretend to say, like himself, “Muse of my native land am I inspired,” we shall adhere to the safe old rule of pauca verba.  We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture L50 upon any thing he can write.  It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starving apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes, &c.  But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.

Z.

ON SHELLEY

[From Blackwood’s Magazine, September, 1820]

“PROMETHEUS UNBOUND”

Whatever may be the difference of men’s opinions concerning the measure of Mr. Shelley’s poetical power, there is one point in regard to which all must be agreed, and that is his Audacity.  In the old days of the exulting genius of Greece, Aeschylus dared two things which astonished all men, and which still astonish them—­to exalt contemporary men into the personages of majestic tragedies—­and to call down and embody into tragedy, without degradation, the elemental spirits of nature and the deeper essences of Divinity.  We scarcely know whether to consider the Persians or the Prometheus Bound as the most extraordinary display of what has always been esteemed the most audacious spirit that ever expressed its workings in poetry.  But what shall we say of the young English poet who has now attempted, not only a flight as high as the highest of Aeschylus, but the very flight of that father of tragedy—­who has dared once more to dramatise Prometheus—­and, most wonderful of all, to dramatise the deliverance of Prometheus—­which is known to have formed the subject of a lost tragedy of Aeschylus no ways inferior in mystic elevation to that of the [Greek:  Desmotaes].

Although a fragment of that perished master-piece be still extant in the Latin version of Attius—­it is quite impossible to conjecture what were the personages introduced in the tragedy of Aeschylus, or by what train of passions and events he was able to sustain himself on the height of that awful scene with which his surviving Prometheus terminates.  It is impossible, however, after reading what is left