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The war-odes of Campbell have scarcely anything to match them in-the English language for energy and fire, while their condensation and the felicitous selection of their versification are in remarkable harmony. Campbell, in allusion to Cymon, has been said to have "conquered both on land and sea," from his Naval Odes and "Hohenlinden" embracing both scenes of warfare.
He remarks, I am afraid, with too much justice, that there is not a single new thought in the pastorals; and, with equal reason, declares, that their chief beauty consists in their correct and musical versification, which has so influenced the English ear, as to render every moderate rhymer harmonious.
By all the critics it is admitted that his version of those Nine Psalms is inferior to what we should have expected from him; nor is it, I think, the mere prejudice of habit that leads those that have been accustomed to one particular revision of Rous's version that which has been the Scottish authorized Psalter since 1650 to prefer Psalms LXXX. LXXXVIII. as there given, rude though the versification is, to the Translations of the same Psalms proposed even by Milton.
But Pope, with a matchless eye for manners, looked at nature with the unpurged vision of his generation, and the poem, though not without dignity and beauty of versification, is, to the modern reader, cold and conventional. To the reader under Anne it was otherwise, for to him "verdant isles" and "waving groves" and the whole farrago of gradus epithets were not only grateful but indispensable.
In another year he was elected a scholar at Magdalen College, his recommendation being his skill in Latin versification. It was the hope and expectation of his parents that he should become a clergyman and follow in his father's footsteps. This also seems to have been the bent of the young man's mind.
From this school have issued two modern epic poems: La guerre des dieux payens contre les dieux chretiens, by PARNY and La conquete de Naples, by GUDIN. The former is distinguished by an easy versification, and an imagination jocose and fertile, though, certainly, far too licentious. Educated in the school of DORAT, he possesses his redundance and grace, without his fatuity.
In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm. Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme.
"This unadorned stone was placed here by the particular desire and express directions of the Right Honourable GEORGE LORD LYTTELTON, who died August 22, 1773, aged 64." Lord Lyttelton's Poems are the works of a man of literature and judgment, devoting part of his time to versification. They have nothing to be despised, and little to be admired.
His versification, in general, is elegant, but not uniformly harmonious. Tibullus and Propertius have each written four books of Elegies; and it has been disputed which of them is superior in this department of poetry. Quintilian has given his suffrage in favour of Tibullus, who, so far as poetical merit alone is the object of consideration, seems entitled to the preference.
She did not question the excellence of his songs, or seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke of the man as she had known him, and was one of the first to assert that Burns was very much more than an uneducated peasant with a happy knack of versification.
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