n innate ear for harmony and melody. And it must be
said that it is just in the passages where Mr. Smith is not copying,
where he forgets for awhile Shelley, Keats, and the rest, and is
content to be simply himself, that he is best; terse, vivid, sound,
manly, simple. May he turn round some day, and deliberately pulling
out all borrowed feathers, look at himself honestly and boldly in the
glass, and we will warrant him, on the strength of the least gaudy,
and as yet unpraised passages in his poems, that he will find himself
after all more eagle than daw, and quite well plumed enough by nature
to fly at a higher, because for him a more natural, pitch than he has
yet done.

True, he has written a great deal of nonsense; nonsense in matter as
well as in manner. But therein, too, he has only followed the
reigning school. As for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his
models, out-Herod Herod. But why not? If Herod be a worthy king,
let him be by all means out-Heroded, if any man can do it. One
cannot have too much of a good thing. If it be right to bedizen
verses with metaphors and similes which have no reference, either in
tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of
them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let
the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's
harness-maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric
splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin
and severe simplicity--not to say utility and comfort. If poetic
diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have
it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical,
abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or
caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human
thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic,
and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an
entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they
are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as
possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If
Marino and Cowley be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young
poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling
their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of
the latter. If Byron's moral (which used to be thought execrable) be
really his great excellence, and his