of which, “almost every poem of any considerable length which obtained any celebrity, during the half century between Pope and Cowper, was writ in blank verse. With the single exception of Falconer’s Shipwreck, it would be in vain to look for any rhymed poem of that age, and of equal extent, which is held in equal estimation with the works of Young, Thompson, Glover, Somerville, Dyer, Akenside and Armstrong.” We all know that one cause, at least, of this studied omission of Goldsmith’s name, was Byron’s favorable opinion of his poetry. This deliberate wrong to the memory of a great departed poet, because of a vehement hatred of a living one, shows Southey’s disposition to be as ungenerous, we may say as contemptible, as his hexameters are coldly manufactured, and surely fated to be dry upon the popular palate to the end of time. He affects to rank Oliver among the followers of Pope and the imitators of his style. But there is as little resemblance between Pope’s terse and splendid rhetoric, and the graphic simplicity and nature of Goldsmith’s poetry, as between the blank verse of Wordsworth or Southey and the noble rhythmus of Paradise Lost. Goldsmith scorned as much to fashion his verse after the mode of Pope as he did to detract from the great merit of that author. He cultivated the elegance and rhyming periods of the classic school, and so identified these with his own original spirit, that he recommended anew what, in themselves, are genuine graces of English poetry. They truly belong to the genius of it—as his fine taste must have taught him—and must continue to do so, in spite of all the sprawling Thalaba hexameters of Southey. The heroic rhyming couplet is capable of as much force, flexibility, and beauty, as any other form of English verse, and is never monotonous in original hands—whether of Chaucer, Dryden, Crabbe, or Keats. Southey, in thus pretending to shut his eyes to the claims of the author of The Traveler, must have still felt (for he was not without a critical sense of the genuine in the Anglo-Saxon) that the great mass of his own poetry, so like a _hortus siccus_, with its elaborated fancies and exotic imagery, must mainly lie upon the shelves of libraries, while Goldsmith’s is fated to be found upon all book-stalls, and to go about to the households and hearts of the people—to be printed in innumerable editions, ornamented with costly engravings, and be found in all parts of the world where the English language is spoken—read by yet unborn generations on the banks of the Burrampooter, the Mississippi, or the Swan River, as freshly and as feelingly as it was, at first, and still continues to be, on those of the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon. And so it is; and thus, as the clown in Twelfth Night says, “does the whirligig of time bring in his revenges.” Somebody, we forget who, says the praise of the people is a finer thing than the homage of the critics: and, in this way, the ghost