Not to keep my readers longer in suspense, the subject of the poem is “The Reformation of the Knave of Hearts”.  It is not improbable that some may object to me that a knave is an unworthy hero for an epic poem—­that a hero ought to be all that is great and good.  The objection is frivolous.  The greatest work of this kind that the world has ever produced has “the Devil” for its hero; and supported as my author is by so great a precedent, I contend that his hero is a very decent hero, and especially as he has the advantage of Milton’s, by reforming, at the end, is evidently entitled to a competent share of celebrity.

I shall now proceed to the more immediate examination of the poem in its different parts.  The beginning, say the critics, ought to be plain and simple—­neither embellished with the flowers of poetry, nor turgid with pomposity of diction.  In this how exactly does our author conform to the established opinion!  He begins thus: 

     “The Queen of Hearts
      She made some tarts”.

Can anything be more clear! more natural! more agreeable to the true spirit of simplicity?  Here are no tropes, no figurative expressions, not even so much as an invocation to the Muse.  He does not detain his readers by any needless circumlocution, by unnecessarily informing them what he is going to sing, or still more unnecessarily enumerating what he is not going to sing; but, according to the precept of Horace:—­

                           In medias res,
      Non secus ac notas, auditorem rapit—­

That is, he at once introduces us and sets us on the most easy and familiar footing imaginable with her Majesty of Hearts, and interests us deeply in her domestic concerns.  But to proceed—­

“The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts,
All on a summer’s day”.

Here indeed the prospect brightens, and we are led to expect some liveliness of imagery, some warmth of poetical colouring; but here is no such thing.  There is no task more difficult to a poet than that of rejection.  Ovid among the ancients, and Dryden among the moderns, were perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it.  The latter, from the haste in which he generally produced his compositions, seldom paid much attention to the limae labor, “the labour of correction”, and seldom, therefore, rejected the assistance of any idea that presented itself.  Ovid, not content with catching the leading features of any scene or character, indulged himself in a thousand minutiae of description, a thousand puerile prettinesses, which were in themselves uninteresting, and took off greatly from the effect of the whole; as the numberless suckers and straggling branches of a fruit-tree, if permitted to shoot out unrestrained, while they are themselves barren and useless, diminish considerably the vigour of the parent stock.  Ovid had more genius but less judgment than Virgil; Dryden more imagination but less correctness than Pope; had