[221] Memoirs, ii. 435-6.
[222] Ibid. ii. 501-2.
[223] Memoirs, ii. 502-3.
[224] Ibid. ii. 503.
[225] 'There is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias,' says Mr. Carlyle, 'which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct truer than his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock's odes escaped him. Perhaps there is no writing in our language that offers so correct an emblem of him as this analysis.' I remember thinking Taylor's 'clear outline' of the Messias the most satisfying account of a poem I ever read: it fills the mind with a vision of pomp and magnificence, which it is pleasanter to contemplate, as it were, from afar, massed together in that general survey, than to examine part by part. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Carlyle agree in exalting that ode of Klopstock's, in which he represents the Muse of Britain and the Muse of Germany running a race. The piece seems to me more rhetorical than strictly poetical; and if the younger Muse's power of keeping up the race depends on productions of this sort, I would not give a penny for her chance, at least if the contest relates to pure poetry. Klopstock's Herman (mentioned afterwards,) consists of three chorus-dramas, as Mr. Taylor calls them: The Battle of Herman, Herman and the Princes, and The Death of Herman. Herman is the Arminius of the Roman historians. S.C.
[226] Leonidus, an epic poem, by R. Glover, first appeared in May, 1737: in the fifth edition, published in 1770, it was corrected and extended from nine books to twelve. Glover was the author of Boadicea and Medea, tragedies, which had some success on the stage. I believe that Leonidas has more merit in the conduct of the design, and in the delineation of character, than as poetry.
'He write an epic poem,' said Thomson, 'who never saw a mountain!' Glover had seen the sun and moon, yet he seems to have looked for their poetical aspects in Homer and Milton, rather than in the sky. 'There is not a single simile in Leonidas,' says Lyttleton, 'that is borrowed from any of the ancients, and yet there is hardly any poem that has such a variety of beautiful comparisons.' The similes of Milton come so flat and dry out of Glover's mangle, that they are indeed quite another thing from what they appear in the poems of that Immortal: ex. gr.
Like wintry clouds, which, opening for a time,
Tinge their black folds with gleams of scattered light:—
Is not this Milton's 'silver lining' stretched and mangled?
The Queen of Night
Gleam'd from the centre of th' etherial vault,
And o'er the raven plumes of darkness shed
Her placid light.