“Stern o’er each bosom reason holds her state, With daring aims, irregularly great: Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.” But there is one respect in which we think his poetry has not been appreciated as it ought. The great change which has taken place in poetry from the classic rhythmus and Cæsural canons of Pope’s school, to the nature and fresher phraseology of our modern period has been commonly dated from the rise of Wordsworth and Coleridge—sometimes traced to the effect of Bishop Percy’s ballads. There is generally an incorrectness in any attempt to fix mutations of taste and fashions of style down to chronology. Instead of thinking the old poetic spirit of England was revived at the close of the eighteenth century, we believe it had not died at all; but had lived on, in exile, while a foreign influence bore sway—as the line of Edgar Atheling lived long ago; destined, however, in the fullness of time to be restored to its ancient supremacy. Bishop Percy’s ballads were a manifestation of that spirit, not a cause of it—though he might not have known it—a necessary reaction of the national mind. At the time of their appearance Goldsmith’s poetry was exhibiting the first tokens of the coming change. The theme of it was human nature, with its common feelings, hopes, and sufferings; and pouring the warmth, pathos and earnestness of his own heart into it, he rendered it attractive and popular. His verse had all the vernacular ease and grace of his prose, with a polish only inferior to Pope’s. In his original hands the heroic couplet was not “the clock-work tintinnabulum of rhyme” beaten by the Cawthornes, Darwins, and Hayleys of the day. In his prose criticisms he wrote against the cumbrous use of epithets, and discarded it in his own verse. He amused himself occasionally among his friends, by reciting the lines of several popular authors, with a dissyllable omitted. He would read the opening of Gray’s Elegy in this way: The curfew tolls the knell of day, The lowing herd winds o’er the lea: The ploughman homeward plods his way And leaves the world to gloom and me. In this respect he must have been rather hard on Johnson, whose poetry in many respects is “the hubbub of words,” which Wordsworth so scornfully terms some of it. The first couplet of the doctor’s great satire has one superfluous line— Let observation, with extended view, Survey mankind from China to Peru— The poem would have started better from “Survey.” Johnson, indeed, used to ridicule the taste that came up with the Percy Ballads. They had “a false gallop of verses,” in his opinion, and he said he could go on making such stanzas for an hour together, thus: As with my hat upon my head, I walked along the Strand, There I met another man With his hat in his hand.