Yet, as a true poet, whose impulse, like fate, overturns all opposition, Drayton is not to be thrown out of his avocation; but intrepidly closes by promising “they shall not deter me from going on with Scotland, if means and time do not hinder me to perform as much as I have promised in my first song.” Who could have imagined that such bitterness of style, and 212 such angry emotions, could have been raised in the breast of a poet of pastoral elegance and fancy?

Whose bounding muse o’er ev’ry mountain rode,
And every river warbled as it flow’d.
Kirkpatrick.

It is melancholy to reflect that some of the greatest works in our language have involved their authors in distress and anxiety: and that many have gone down to their grave insensible of that glory which soon covered it.

THE ILLUSIONS OF WRITERS IN VERSE.

Who would, with the awful severity of Plato, banish poets from the Republic? But it may be desirable that the Republic should not be banished from poets, which it seems to be when an inordinate passion for writing verses drives them from every active pursuit. There is no greater enemy to domestic quiet than a confirmed versifier; yet are most of them much to be pitied: it is the mediocre critics they first meet with who are the real origin of a populace of mediocre poets. A young writer of verses is sure to get flattered by those who affect to admire what they do not even understand, and by those who, because they understand, imagine they are likewise endowed with delicacy of taste and a critical judgment. What sacrifices of social enjoyments, and all the business of life, are lavished with a prodigal’s ruin in an employment which will be usually discovered to be a source of early anxiety, and of late disappointment![137] I say nothing of the ridicule in which it involves some wretched Mævius, but of the misery that falls so heavily on him, and is often 213 entailed on his generation. Whitehead has versified an admirable reflection of Pope’s, in the preface to his works:—

For wanting wit be totally undone,
And barr’d all arts, for having fail’d in one?

The great mind of Blackstone never showed him more a poet than when he took, not without affection, “a farewell of the Muse,” on his being called to the bar. Drummond, of Hawthornden, quitted the bar from his love of poetry; yet he seems to have lamented slighting the profession which his father wished him to pursue. He perceives his error, he feels even contrition, but still cherishes it: no man, not in his senses, ever had a more lucid interval:—

I changed countries, new delights to find;
But ah! for pleasure I did find new pain;
Enchanting pleasure so did reason blind,
That father’s love and words I scorn’d as vain.
I know that all the Muses’ heavenly lays,
With toil of spirit which are so dearly bought,
As idle sounds of few or none are sought,
That there is nothing lighter than vain praise;
Know what I list, this all cannot me move,
But that, alas! I both must write and love!