licentious hours of a hobbledehoy braggadocio and swagger. _At last_, then, we are in a condition to be criticised—even more, to be neglected; and the journalist is no longer in danger of being impeached for _lèse-majesté_ of the Democratic Spirit, who shall assert, with sufficient humility, that we have committed an error in mistaking “Kettell’s Specimens” for the Pentateuch, or Joseph Rodman Drake for Apollo. The case of this latter gentleman is one which well illustrates what we have been saying. We believe it was some five years ago that Mr. Dearborn republished the “Culprit Fay,” which then, as at the period of its original issue, was belauded by the universal American press, in a manner which must have appeared ludicrous—not to speak _very_ plainly—in the eyes of all unprejudiced observers. With a curiosity much excited by comments at once so grandiloquent and so general, we procured and read the poem. What we found it we ventured to express distinctly, and at some length, in the pages of the “Southern Messenger.” It is a well-versified and sufficiently fluent composition, without high merit of any kind. Its defects are gross and superabundant. Its plot and conduct, considered in reference to its scene, are absurd. Its originality is none at all. Its imagination (and this was the great feature insisted upon by its admirers,) is but a “counterfeit presentment,”—but the shadow of the shade of that lofty quality which is, in fact, the soul of the Poetic Sentiment—but a drivelling _effort to be fanciful_—an effort resulting in a species of hop-skip-and-go-merry rhodomontade, which the uninitiated feel it a duty to call ideality, and to admire as such, while lost in surprise at the impossibility of performing at least the latter half of the duty with any thing like satisfaction to themselves. And all this we not only asserted, but without difficulty _proved_. Dr. Drake has written some beautiful poems, but the “Culprit Fay,” is not of them. We neither expected to hear any dissent from our opinions, nor did we hear any. On the contrary, the approving voice of every critic in the country whose _dictum_ we had been accustomed to respect, was to us a sufficient assurance that we had not been very grossly in the wrong. In fact the public taste was then _approaching_ the right. The truth indeed had not, as yet, made itself heard; but we had reached a point at which it had but to be plainly and boldly _put_, to be, at least tacitly, admitted.