t DON
CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was
inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works:
indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be
forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who
often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more
so.[233]

[231] Voss, who lived from Feb. 20, 1751, to March, 1826, was author of
the Luise, 'a rural epopaea of simple structure divided into three
idyls, which relate the betrothment and marriage of the heroine.' This
is a pleasing and very peculiar poem, composed in hexameter verse. 'The
charm of the narrative,' says Mr. T., 'consists in the minute
description of the local domestic manners of the personages.' The charm
consists, I think, in the blending of these manners with the beauty of
Nature, and the ease and suitability of the versification. Voss's
translation of the Odyssey is praised for being so perfect an imitation
of the original. The Greek has been rendered, 'with a fidelity and
imitative harmony so admirable, that it suggests to the scholar the
original wording, and reflects, as from a mirror, every beauty and every
blemish of the ancient poem.' Hist. Survey, pp. 61-68. S. C.

[232] Act III. Sc. 2. The night scene, which is the 5th of Act iv, is
fine too in a frantic way. The songs it contains are very spirited. That
sung by the Robbers is worthy of a Thug; it goes beyond our notions of
any European bandit, and transports us to the land of Jaggernat. S. C.

[233] The works of Buerger, who was born on the first day of 1748, died
June 8, 1794, consist of Poems (2 vols.), Macbeth altered from
Shakespeare, (pronounced by Taylor,--no good judge of _Shakespeare_,--in
some respects superiour to the original,) Munchauesen's Travels;
Translations; (of the six first books of the Iliad, and some others);
Papers philological and political. His fame rests chiefly on three
ballads, The Wild Hunter, The Parson's Daughter, and Lenore. The
powerful diction and admirable harmony,--rhythm, sound, rhyme of these
compositions Mr. Taylor describes as the result of laborious art; it
strikes me, from the outline which he has given of Buerger's history,
that the violent feelings, the life-like expression of which constitutes
their power and value, may have been partly the reflex of the poet's own
mind. His seems to have been a