[41]. So the old song joyously celebrates their arrival:—
‘The beggars are coming to town,
Some in rags, and some in jags, and some in velvet gowns,’
[42]. The story of the Heart of Midlothian was, we understand, got up at the Surrey Theatre last year by Mr. Dibdin, in the most creditable style. A Miss Taylor, we hear, made an inimitable Jenny Deans, Miss Copeland was surprising as Madge Wildfire, Mrs. Dibdin as Queen Caroline, was also said to be a complete piece of royal wax-work, and Dumbydikes was done to the life. Would we had seen them so done; but we can answer for these things positively on no authority but our own. If they make as good a thing of Ivanhoe, they will do more than the author has done.
[43]. Miss Baillie has much of the power and spirit of dramatic writing, and not the less because, as a woman, she has been placed out of the vortex of philosophical and political extravagances.
[44]. We have given this sentence in marks of quotation, and yet it is our own. We should put a stop to the practices of ‘such petty larceny rogues’—but that it is not worth while.
[45]. Generosity and simplicity are not the characteristic virtues of poets. It has been disputed whether ‘an honest man is the noblest work of God.’ But we think an honest poet is so.
[46]. ‘Or mouth with slumbery pout.’ Keats’s Endymion.
The phrase might be applied to Miss Stephens: though it is a vile phrase, worse than Hamlet’s ‘beautified’ applied to Ophelia. Indeed it has been remarked that Mr. Keats resembles Shakspeare in the novelty and eccentricity of his combinations of style. If so, it is the only thing in which he is like Shakspeare: and yet Mr. Keats, whose misfortune and crime it is, like Milton, to have been born in London, is a much better poet than Mr. Wilson, or his Patroclus Mr. Lockart; nay, further, if Sir Walter Scott (the sly Ulysses of the Auld Reekie school,) had written many of the passages in Mr. Keats’s poems, they would have been quoted as the most beautiful in his works. We do not here (on the banks of the Thames) damn the Scotch novels in the lump, because the writer is a Sawney Scot. But the sweet Edinburgh wits damn Mr. Keats’s lines in the lump, because he is born in London. ‘Oh Scotland, judge of England, what a treasure hast thou in one fair son, and one fair son-in-law, neither of whom (by all accounts) thou lovest passing well!’
[47]. The Fancy is not used here in the sense of Mr. Peter Corcoran, but in a sense peculiar to Mr. Coleridge, and hitherto undefined by him.