“And whom do you estimate after Crabbe?”
“I am disposed to say Hogg. His Queen’s Wake is a splendid and impassioned work. I like it for its varieties, and its utter simplicity. What a fine image is this of a devoted vessel suddenly engulfed at sea:
“Some ran to the cords, some kneel’d at the shrine.
But all the wild elements seem’d to combine;
’Twas just but one moment of stir and commotion,
And down went the ship like a bird of the ocean!”
“But do not altogether take me at my word in what I say of Crabbe and Hogg. They have struck the chord of my taste; but they are not, perhaps, the first men of the day. Moore is a writer for whom I feel a strong affection, because he has done that which I would have done if I could: but after him it would be vain to try any thing.”
*****
“Is it your opinion that the swarm of minor poets and writers advance the cause of literature, or that the public taste would be more refined and informed, if those who administered to it were fewer and better?”
“I object to prescribing laws to the republic of letters. It is a free republic, in which every man is entitled to publicity if he chooses it. The effect unquestionably of a swarm of minor poets is the creation of a false taste amongst a certain class; but then that is a class that otherwise would have no taste at all, and it is well to draw their attention to literature by any agency. In the next age their moral culture will improve, and we shall go on gradually diminishing the contagion.”[199]
[199] New Monthly Magazine.