Our friend Griswold’s collection of American poetry, the invariable target of all that “gentle dullness which ever loves a joke,” is, of course, made the especial mark of our Frenchman’s malicious raillery. “The distinctive sign of all the specimens,” he says, “is commonplace; they are all made with a shoemaker’s punch. Take off your hats, salute these images, they are from the _Gradus ad Parnassum_. The worn-out forms of Europe make fortunes in the States, as bonnets of past fashions do in the Colonies. The figures are stereotyped; the lake is ever blue, the forest ever trembling, the eagle invariably sublime. The bad Spanish poets did not write more rapidly _stantes pede in uno_, their wretched rhymes, than the modern American verse-makers, bankers, settlers, merchants, clerks, and tavern-keepers, their epics and their odes. In the way of counterfeiting they are quite at ease. One re-does the Giour, another the Dunciad. Mr. Charles Fenno Hoffman repeats the songs of Thomas Moore; Mr. Sprague models after Pope and Collins. One takes the Byronic stanza, another appropriates the cadence and images of Wordsworth. Mrs. Hemans, Tennyson, Milnes, all find imitators. Once the consecration of the British public given, the American counterfeit soon appears.” Is not this in the very spirit of little Isaac--“roguish, perhaps, but keen, devilish keen!” Still, it is really too bad that a Frenchman should presume to attack our poetry on the ground of imitation and diffuseness. What has been the larger part of French poetry for five centuries? Has it not been cold imitation of classical models or red-republican spasm? The French poets have been five centuries at work, and yet where is French poetry? graceful, vigorous, vital, national poetry? Why, is it not notorious that it was fast dwindling from frigid imitation into hopeless imbecility when it was roused by the convulsive school--which is but feebleness gone stark mad and raving? The French never had any poetry, growing naturally out of the national mind, like the poetry of Greece, or Italy, or Spain, or England. Ah! Philarète Chasles, smirking so conceitedly in your national glass-house, beware how you throw stones! You Frenchmen, who imitate even in your revolutions--you, whose republican heroes are but caricatures “done into” French from Plutarch, and about as much like the original as Ovid “Englished” by a Grub-Street hack of Charles’s day--you talk of imitation!