One advantage of works of the description we are now reviewing, is that they bring together popular specimens of the poetry of very different ages. Miss Mitford gives us a few from Cowley, and still earlier writers. The impression they made upon us led to some trains of thought upon the manifest progress of taste, which we have not space here to pursue, and which would be wearisome on the present occasion, if we were to attempt to follow them out. But we cannot help observing that even quite secondary writers are daily producing amongst us far better verses, in every respect, than many of those which have acquired, and seem still to retain, a high traditional celebrity. We are not altogether blind, we think, to the literary foibles of our own age, although we cannot, of course, hope to appreciate them as clearly as those who come after us will do. We suspect that the poets of our own day are exposed to the charge of vagueness, of being what is sometimes called mystical, of verging too closely, in their subtilty and spiritual refinement, upon the land of no-meaning; but this is "a better bad habit" than that very mechanical manner of verse-making, so obvious in many of those specimens which are handed down to us in our "Speakers," and "Elegant Extracts," as choice selections from the old standard poetry of England. The least possible quantity of thought seems to have sufficed for their manufacture; one image suggests another, either by resemblance or contrast; and thus the writer goes on, contriving new verses, with never a new thought. If a pleasing image is introduced, it is spoilt by the incessant _variations_ that are forthwith composed upon the same theme; if a fine expression is struck out, it is marred the next moment by the mechanical changes that are rung upon it. Here is a noble line of Cowley's:-- "Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good!" But you must read it alone: the next line ruins it-- "Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good! _Hail, ye plebeian underwood!_" Having written the word "patrician," it followed, as a rule, that he must look about for something to be called "plebeian!" Miss Mitford has placed amongst her extracts the song by Richard Lovelace, supposed to be written when in prison, in which the well-known lines occur:-- "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage." The mind being free, there is true liberty. A very excellent theme for the poet. In the first verse, speaking of his "divine Althæa," he says, "When I lie tangled in her hair, And fettered with her eye, _The birds, that wanton in the air, Know no such liberty_." This is pretty; but unfortunately the birds in the air suggest the fishes in the sea. So the next verse concludes thus:--