The transition from these to Mr. Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory, is not far:  he is a very lady-like poet.  He is an elegant, but feeble writer.  He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is full of enigmas with no meaning to them; is studiously inverted, and scrupulously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose.  He differs from Milton in this respect, who is accused of having inserted a number of prosaic lines in Paradise Lost.  This kind of poetry, which is a more minute and inoffensive species of the Della Cruscan, is like the game of asking what one’s thoughts are like.  It is a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgetty translation of every thing from the vulgar tongue, into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping mimminee-pimminee of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction.  You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression.  The fastidious and languid reader is never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chance in the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligible idea.  You cannot see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish.  The whole is refined, and frittered away into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and tremulous imbecility.—­There is no other fault to be found with the Pleasures of Memory, than a want of taste and genius.  The sentiments are amiable, and the notes at the end highly interesting, particularly the one relating to the Countess Pillar (as it is called) between Appleby and Penrith, erected (as the inscription tells the thoughtful traveller) by Anne Countess of Pembroke, in the year 1648, in memory of her last parting with her good and pious mother in the same place in the year 1616—­

      “To shew that power of love, how great
      Beyond all human estimate.”

This story is also told in the poem, but with so many artful innuendos and tinsel words, that it is hardly intelligible; and still less does it reach the heart.

Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope is of the same school, in which a painful attention is paid to the expression in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry.  How much the sense and keeping in the ideas are sacrificed to a jingle of words and epigrammatic turn of expression, may be seen in such lines as the following:—­one of the characters, an old invalid, wishes to end his days under

      “Some hamlet shade, to yield his sickly form
      Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.”

Now the antithesis here totally fails:  for it is the breeze, and not the tree, or as it is quaintly expressed, hamlet shade, that affords health, though it is the tree that affords shelter in or from the storm.  Instances of the same sort of curiosa infelicitas are not rare in this author.  His verses on the Battle of Hohenlinden have considerable spirit and animation.  His Gertrude of Wyoming is his principal performance.  It is a kind of historical paraphrase of Mr. Wordsworth’s poem of Ruth.  It shews little power, or power enervated by extreme fastidiousness.  It is