himself. The first and simplest form
in which any metrical ear, or fancy, or imagination, can show itself,
must needs be in imitating existing models. Innate good taste--that
is, true poetic genius--will of course choose the best models in the
long run. But not necessarily at first. What shall be the student's
earliest ideal must needs be determined for him by circumstance, by
the books to which he has access, by the public opinion which he
hears expressed. Enough if he chooses, as Raphael did, the best
models which he knows, and tries to exhaust them, and learn all he
can from them, ready to quit them hereafter when he comes across
better ones, yet without throwing away what he has learnt. "Be
faithful in a few things, and thou shalt become ruler over many
things," is one of those eternal moral laws which, like many others,
holds as true of art as it does of virtue.

And on the whole, judging Mr. Alexander Smith by this rule, he has
been faithful over a few things, and therefore we have fair hope of
him for the future. For Mr. Smith does succeed, not in copying one
poet, but in copying all, and very often in improving on his models.
Of the many conceits which he has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, there is
hardly one which he has not made more true, more pointed and more
sweet; nay, in one or two places, he has dared to mend John Keats
himself. But his whole merit is by no means confined to the faculty
of imitation. Though the "Life Drama" itself is the merest cento of
reflections and images, without coherence or organisation, dramatic
or logical, yet single scenes, like that with the peasant and that
with the fallen outcast, have firm self-consistency and clearness of
conception; and these, as a natural consequence, are comparatively
free from those tawdry spangles which deface the greater part of the
poem. And, moreover, in the episode of "The Indian and the Lady,"
there is throughout a "keeping in the tone," as painters say, sultry
and languid, yet rich and full of life, like a gorgeous Venetian
picture, which augurs even better for Mr. Smith's future success than
the two scenes just mentioned; for consistency of thought may come
with time and training; but clearness of inward vision, the faculty
of imagination, can be no more learnt than it can be dispensed with.
In this, and this only it is true that poeta nascitur non fit; just
as no musical learning or practice can make a composer, unless he
first possess a