W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a
beautiful fountain-spring of thought and feeling, which should have
screened their writer from the venomous shaft of Byron, have already
sunk beneath the meridian of their popularity; and the loaded ornamental
rhymes of Darwin; the prettily embroidered couplets of Miss Seward,
together with the Della Cruscan Rhymes of Mary Robinson, Mrs. Cowley,
&c. are left like daisies, plucked from the greensward, to perish
beneath unfeeling neglect. Who now reads the verses of Ann Yearsley, the
poetic milkwoman, who was so lauded beyond her deserts, by Mrs. H.
More?--few or none. Why is this revolution in public taste? Because
those master-spirits which guide the present age, have given birth to a
species of poetry more legitimate and useful in its design, and more
valuable in its tendencies and characteristics. Instead of the "namby
pamby" verses of the period I have alluded to, and the coarse scurrility
of style which runs with a discolouring vein through the satirical pages
of Dr. Wolcot, we have now the heart-stirring metres of a Campbell, as
in that beautiful rainbow of poetic loveliness and imagination, his
"Pleasures of Hope.
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