of this poetical power are put out of sight by the pomp
of machinery. Where truth is sufficient to fill the mind, fiction is
worse than useless; the counterfeit debases the genuine. His account of
Milton's blindness, if we suppose it caused by study in the formation
of his poem (a supposition surely allowable), is poetically true, and
happily imagined. But the CAR of Dryden, with his TWO COURSERS, has
nothing in it peculiar; it is a car in which any other rider may be
placed.

"The Bard" appears, at the first view, to be, as Algarotti and others
have remarked, an imitation of the prophecy of Nereus. Algarotti thinks
it superior to its original; and, if preference depends only on the
imagery and animation of the two poems, his judgment is right. There is
in "The Bard" more force, more thought, and more variety. But to copy is
less than to invent, and the copy has been unhappily produced at a wrong
time. The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible; but its revival
disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable falsehood. INCREDULUS ODI.
To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous
appendages of spectres and predictions, has little difficulty; for he
that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has
little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only
as we find something to be imitated or declined. I do not see that "The
Bard" promotes any truth, moral or political. His stanzas are too long,
especially his epodes; the ode is finished before the ear has learned
its measures, and consequently before it can receive pleasure from their
consonance and recurrence. Of the first stanza the abrupt beginning
has been celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise only to
the inventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his
subject that has read the ballad of "Johnny Armstrong,"

"Is there ever a man in all Scotland--?"

The initial resemblances or alliterations, "ruin, ruthless," "helm or
hauberk," are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavours at sublimity.
In the second stanza the Bard is well described, but in the third
we have the puerilities of obsolete mythology. When we are told that
"Cadwallo hushed the stormy main," and that "Modred made huge Plinlimmon
bow his cloud-topped head," attention recoils from the repetition of
a tale that, even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn. The
WEAVING of the WINDING-SHEET he borrowed,