ABSTRACT
As some apology for our too long neglect of these interesting and unassuming little volumes, we beg to assure our friends, that it arose from accidental circumstances, over which we had no controul; and that our feelings towards them are distinctly the reverse of those, which withheld us from noticing the inflated quartos of Lady Morgan. In the present instance we are gratified with simple nature, seen with a Poet’s eye, and depicted in a Poet’s language; while in the nondescript volumes of her radical Ladyship, we have every thing but nature. Her pages of history are, for the most part, filled with a senseless tirade against all established authorities and all national institutions; and her style consists of a series of unmeaning rhapsodies, far nearer approaching to her Ladyship’s old vocation of novel writing, than befitting a recorder of historical facts; while her political self importance, her religious quackery, and her unbounded egotism, are positively more repelling than downright ignorance. We may reasonably hope to be forgiven this almost unintentional digression, even upon such a disagreeable subject, as we have had no previous opportunity of noticing her Ladyship in propria persona; and we can faithfully assure our readers, that this will be our only transgression. Leaving Lady Morgan, therefore, to amend her Irish Tour in Italy as she feels best inclined, we now turn with additional 166pleasure to young Clare’s Poetry, as the first fruits of that partial respite from severe labour, which literary benevolence has purchased for their amiable and deserving author. And however we may be usually compelled to coincide in that worldly wisdom, which invariably insists, that to encourage the ‘idle trade’ of verse-making is to spoil useful mechanics; yet deeply indeed should we condemn that avarice of humanity, which could for a moment hesitate in assisting and encouraging such an individual as John Clare. Real talent, however, loves to contend not merely with difficulties, but with impossibilities, and we can participate the almost rapture, that, with such vivid feelings as our author is gifted with, he must have hailed his benefactors’ kindness. We can, in our ‘mind’s eye,’ contrast the poor friendless beggared rustic, often perhaps without even the bare materials with which to give his poetic breathings their first rude form;—with the same individual raised to hope, happiness, connubial bliss, and domestic comfort, through the offerings of liberality at the shrine of genius, and the tributes of warm-hearted benevolence to industrious virtue. Clare may indeed exclaim,— Once on the cold and winter shaded side Of a bleak hill, mischance had rooted me; Transplanted now to the gay sunny vale, Like the greenthorn of May, my fortune flowers!
