"We notice Mr. Blackbrook as the representative of a school--the Doleful School. He draws terrible pictures; but what are his materials? He does not write from the heart, inasmuch as, if he really felt that incessant agony, which is his everlasting theme, we should find in his performances some original imagery--something with an individual stamp. We rather hold Mr. Blackbrook to be a very deliberate, vain, and calculating being, who takes advantage of a domestic calamity to display his knack of verse-making; who composedly turns a couplet upon the coffin of his mistress; whose sympathy and sensibility are only the ingenious masks of inordinate self-esteem. His view of the poetic is only worthy of an undertaker. He sees nature through a black-crape vail. He describes graves with the minuteness of a body-snatcher; and when he would be impressive is disgusting. You see the actor, not the poet. He admits you (for he can not help it) behind the scenes. His rhymes are not the music of a poetic faculty; but rather the jingle of a parrot. He is one of a popular school, however; and while the public buy his wares, he will continue to fashion them. Materialist to the back-bone, he simpers about the littleness of human dealings and human sympathies. He who pretends to be melted with pity over the fate of a fly, would use his mother's tombstone as a writing-desk. He deals in human sorrow, as his baker deals in loaves. Nervous dowagers, who love tears and 'dreadful descriptions;' who enjoy 'a good cry;' and who have the peculiar faculty of seeing the dark side of every thing, enjoy his dish of verses amazingly. To sensitive young ladies there is a terrible fascination in his inventories of the tomb and its appendages; and children are afraid to walk about in the dark, after listening to one of his effusions. The followers of his school include one or two formidable young ladies, who enter into descriptions of death--that is to say, the material part of death--with a minuteness that must excite the envy even of the most ingenious auctioneer. When bent upon a fresh composition, these terrible young poetesses, having killed a child, proceed to trace its journey to the tomb--its return to earth. How they gloat over the dire changes!--how systematically the painful portrait is proceeded with! In this they rival Chinese artists. And people of ill-regulated sympathy, who, containing within them all the elements of spiritual culture, are yet affected only by sensual appeals, regard these doleful effusions as the outpourings of true human suffering.