[46]. Venice.
[47]. There is a false concord here.
[48]. This word is not English, nor its meaning clear.
[49]. Why is the word portion here used, as if it were a portion of Scripture?
‘Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a portion with judicious care.’
Cottar’s Saturday Night.
Now, Mr. Wordsworth’s poems, though not profane, yet neither are they sacred, to deserve this solemn style, though some of his admirers have gone so far as to compare them for primitive, patriarchal simplicity, to the historical parts of the Bible. Much has been said of the merits and defects of this large poem, which is ‘portion of a larger;’—perhaps Horace’s rule has been a double bar to its success—Non satis est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto. The features of this author’s muse want sweetness of expression as well as regularity of outline.
[50]. A French teacher, in reading Titus and Berenice with an English pupil, used to exclaim, in raptures, at the best passages, ‘What have you in Shakespeare equal to this?’ This showed that he had a taste for Racine, and a power of appreciating his beauties, though he might want an equal taste for Shakespeare.
[51]. It is a fashion among the scientific or pedantic part of the musical world to decry Miss Stephens’s singing as feeble and insipid. This it is to take things by their contraries. Her excellence does not lie in force or contrast, but in sweetness and simplicity. To give only one instance. Any person who does not feel the beauty of her singing the lines in Artaxerxes, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c., in which the notes seem to fall from her lips like languid drops from the bending flower, and her voice flutters and dies away with the expiring conflict of passion in her bosom, may console himself with the possession of other faculties, but assuredly he has no ear for music.