Doubtless, there have been mighty men of song higher in rank, as earlier in time, than any now who dare to try a chirrup: but there are also many of our anonymous minstrels, with whom the greater number of the so-called old English poets could not with advantage to the ancients justly be compared.

Look at '_Johnson's Lives_.' Who can read the book, and the specimens it glorifies, without rejoicing in his prose, and thoroughly despising their poetry ?--With a few brilliant exceptions, of course, (for ill-used Milton, Pope--and shall we in the same sentence put Dryden ?--are there,) a more wretched set of halfpenny-a-liners never stormed mob-trodden Parnassus.

The poetry of Queen Anne's time and thereabouts, I judge to have been at the lowest bathos of badness; all satyrs, and swains, fulsome flattery of titles, and foolish adoration of painted shepherdesses: poor weak hobbling lines, eked out by 'eds and expletives, often terminated by false rhymes, and made lamer by triplets and dreary Alexandrines; ill-selected subjects, laboured, indelicate, or impossible similes, passions frigid as Diana, wit's weapons dull as lead.

Yet these (many exceptions doubtless there were, and many redeeming _morceaux_ even in the worst, charitable reader, but as of the rule we speak not falsely), these are the poets of England, the men our great grandfathers delighted to honour, the feared, the praised, the pensioned, and those whom we their children still denominate--the poets! Praise, praise your stars, ye lucky imps of Fame! who could tolerate you now-a-days ?--You lived in golden times, when Dorset, Harley, Bolingbroke, Halifax, and Company, gave away places of a thousand a-year, as but justly due to any man who could pen a roaring song, fabricate a fulsome sonnet, or bewail in meagre elegiacs the still-resisting virtue of some persecuted Stella! Happy fellows, easy conquisitors of wealth and fame, autocrats of coffee-houses, feted and favoured by town-bred dames! In those good old times for the fashionable Nine, an epic was sure to lead to a Ministry-of-State, and even an epigram produced its pension: to be a poet, or reputed so, was to be--eligible for all things; and the fortunate possessor of a rhyming dictionary might have governed Europe with his metrical protocols.

But these halcyon times are of the past--and so, verily, are their heroes.