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Dr. Stancliffe, well known as a popular lecturer, is about to publish a volume of Chymical Experiments, for the use of students, consisting of nearly one thousand, in the various branches of that science. This work, Blair's Grammar of Chymistry, and Nicholson's Dictionary, will form a complete course for students. The Rev. George Crabbe has in the press a new volume of poems, entitled The Borough, in an octavo volume. Mr. Mortimer's new Dictionary of Commerce, Trade, and Manufactures, will appear in a few days. Mr. George Ensor, has nearly ready for publication, the first part of a Treatise on National Government. SELECT REVIEWS, FOR APRIL, 1810. FROM THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. THE COLUMBIAD; A Poem. By Joel Barlow. pp. 454. quarto. Philadelphia, 1807 Reprinted for Phillips, London. 8vo. pp. 420. 1809. AS epick poetry has often been the earliest, as well as the most precious production of national genius, we ought not, perhaps, to be surprised at this goodly firstling of the infant muse of America. The truth, however, is, that though the American government be new, the people is, in all respects, as old as the people of England; and their want of literature is to be ascribed, not to the immaturity of their progress in civilisation, but to the nature of the occupations in which they are generally engaged. These federal republicans, in short, bear no sort of resemblance to the Greeks of the days of Homer, or the Italians of the age of Dante; but are very much such people, we suppose, as the modern traders of Manchester, Liverpool, or Glasgow. They have all a little Latin whipped into them in their youth; and read Shakspeare, Pope, and Milton, as well as bad English novels, in their days of courtship and leisure. They are just as likely to write epick poems, therefore, as the inhabitants of our trading towns at home; and are entitled to no more admiration when they succeed, and to no more indulgence when they fail, than would be due, on a similar occasion, to any of those industrious persons. Be this, however, as it may, Mr. Barlow, we are afraid, will not be the Homer of his country; and will never take his place among the enVOL. III. 2 E during poets either of the old or of the new world. The faults which obviously cut him off from this high destiny, may be imputed partly to his country, and partly to his subject; but chiefly to himself. The want of a literary society, to animate, control and refine, and the intractableness of a subject which extends from the creation to the millennium, and combines the rude mythologies of savages with the treaties and battles of men who are still alive, certainly aggravated the task which he had undertaken with no common difficulties. But the great misfortune undoubtedly is, that Mr. Barlow is, in no respect, qualified to overcome these difficulties. From the prose which he has introduced into this volume, and even from much of what is given as poetry, it is easy to see that he is a man of a plain, strong, and resolute understanding; a very good republican; and a considerable despiser of all sorts of prejudices and illusions; but without any play or vivacity of fancy; any gift of simplicity or pathos; any loftiness of genius, or delicacy of taste. Though not deficient in literature, therefore, nor unread in poetry, he has evidently none of the higher elements of a poet in his composition; and has, accordingly, made a most injudicious choice and unfortunate application of the models which lay before him. Like other persons of a cold and coarse imagination, he is caught only by what is glaring and exaggerated; and seems to have no perception of the finer and less obtrusive graces which constitute all the lasting and deep-felt charms of poetry. In his cumbrous and inflated style, he is constantly mistaking hyperbole for grandeur, and supplying the place of simplicity with huge patches of mere tameness and vulgarity. This curious intermixture, indeed, of extreme homeliness and flatness, with a sort of turbulent and bombastick elevation, is the great characteristick of the work before us. Instead of aspiring to emulate the sublime composure of Milton, or the natural eloquence and flowing nervousness of Dryden, Mr. Barlow has bethought him of transferring to epick poetry the light, sparkling, and tawdry diction of Darwin, and of narrating great events, and delivering lofty precepts in an unhappy imitation of that picturesque, puerile, and pedantick style, which alternately charms and disgusts us in the pages of our poetical physiologist. Infinitely more verbose and less spirited than Darwin, however, hè reminds us of him, only by his characteristick defects; and, after all, is most tolerable in those passages in which he reminds us most of him. Such is the general character of this transatlantick epick, as to style and taste in composition. As for the more substantial requisites of such a work, it is, unfortunately, still more deficient. Though crowded with names, and confused with incidents, it cannot properly be said to have either characters or action. In sketching the history of America from the days of Manco Capac down to the present day, and a few thousand years lower, the author, of course, cannot spare time to make us acquainted with any one individual. The most important personages, therefore, appear but once upon the scene, and then pass away and are forgotten. Mr. Barlow's exhibition, accordingly, partakes more of the nature of a procession, than of a drama. River gods, sachems, majors of militia, all enter at one side of his stage, and go off at the other, never to return. Rocha and Oella take up as much room as Greene and Washington; and the rivers Potomack and Delaware, those fluent and venerable personages, both act and talk a great deal more than Jefferson or Franklin. It is plain, that in a poem constructed upon such a plan, there can be no development of character, no unity, or even connexion of action, and consequently no interest, and scarcely any coherence or contrivance in the story. Of a work of this magnitude and curiosity, however, it is proper that our readers should be enabled, in some measure, to judge for themselves; and, therefore, we shall proceed to lay before them a short abstract of the plan, and to subjoin such extracts as are calculated to convey a just notion of its execution. Columbus, it is well known, was repaid for his great discovery with signal ingratitude; and was at one time loaded with chains, and imprisoned on the instigation of an envious rival. The poem opens with a view of his dungeon, and a long, querulous soliloquy addressed to its walls. All on a sudden, the gloom is illuminated, by the advent of a celestial personage; and the guardian angel of America is introduced by the name of Hesper, who consoles and sooths the heroick prisoner, by leading him up to a shadowy mount, from which he entertains him with a full prospect of the vast continent he had discovered, and sets before him, in a long vision, which lasts till the end of the poem, all the events which had happened, and were to happen, in that region, or in any other connected with it. Thus, the whole history, past, present, and future, of America, and in clusively of the whole world, is delivered in the clumsy and revolting form of a miraculous vision; and thus truth is not only blended with falsehood and fancy, but is presented to the mind, under the mask of the grossest and most palpable fiction. Mr. Barlow, of course, judges differently of his plan, and maintains, not only that it gives great interest and dignity to the story, but that it has enabled him "to observe the unities of time, place, and action, more rigidly than any other poet; the whole action consisting in what takes place between Columbus and Hesper, which must be supposed to Occupy but a few hours." There never was so cheap and ingenious a method of satisfying the unities as this. Here is a poem of some seven or eight thousand verses, containing a sketch of universal history, from the deluge to the final conflagration, with particular notices of all the battles, factions, worthies, and improvements in America, for the last half century; and when we complain of the enormous extent and confusion of this metrical chronicle, we are referred to some fifty forgotten lines at the outset, from which it appears, that Columbus came to the knowledge of all these fine things by seeing them rehearsed before him one dark night, on the top of a mountain in Spain. If this apology is to be received, Mr. Scott might hold out his beautiful outlaw, the Lay of the Last Minstrel, as a perfect pattern of the unities; since the whole story is told in one afternoon, in the dressing room of the dutchess of Buccleugh. The ancient poets, in like manner, had nothing more to do than to prefix a notice, that the whole piece was dictated to them by a muse in any given grotto or bower. Nay, even a degenerate modern, it would seem, might, upon the same principle, securely evade this most rigorous law of the unities, by merely notifying in verse, that his rambling epick was all com posed by him in the course of one term, and within the precincts of one garret. Is it possible that self-partiality should have so far blinded a man of Mr. Barlow's acuteness, as to make it necessary to remind him, that the unity which the reader requires in a long poem, must be in the subject, and not in the manner of introducing it; and that the miscellaneous history of four thousand years does not become one story, by being represented in one vision, any more than by being bound up in one volume? It is time, however, to give a short sketch of this visionary legend. The first part of it belongs rather to geography than to civil history, and contains a long description of the American hills, lakes, rivers, and vegetable productions. The next chapter goes on to the animal kingdom, and is chiefly occupied with the physiology of its human natives, and a theory about its population. Two whole books are then devoted to the fabulous exploits of Manco Capac and Oella, the Osiris and Isis of the Peruvian mythology; their institutions civil and religious; and their conquest and conversion of the more ferocious savages around them. After this, there is a very short sketch of the Spanish oppressions, followed out by a speculation upon the popish superstition, the Jesuits, and the inquisition. The voyages of sir Walter Raleigh, and the colonisation of Virginia, are then commemorated: and the next book contains the history of the Canadian war 1757, with the defeat of Braddock and the death of Wolfe; and then begins the story of the colonial war, which is given with considerable detail in the course of the two following books. This ends the historical, and introduces the prophetick part of Mr. Barlow's poem. The eighth book is dedicated to a survey of the progress which America is destined to make in art, virtue and happiness; and the ninth and sion of a still greater number of original, English words from their proper use or signification, by employing nouns substantive for verbs, for instance, and adjectives for substantives, &c. We shall set down a few examples of each. tenth, which close the work, to a view of the general happiness of mankind, when all the nations of the earth shall have been taught, by the example of America, to renounce war and violence, to unite in one great, federal republick, and to hold a grand, annual congress of sages in In the first class, we may reckon Egypt, for the purpose of renoun- the words multifluvian-cosmogyral cing all prejudices, and consulting crass-role-gride-conglaciate for the general happiness. With this colon and coloniarck-trist and conbeatifick vision Hesper closes his tristed-thirl-gerb-ludibrious—-— splendid exhibition; and leaves Co- croupe-scow--emban―lowe—brume lumbus quite comforted and satisfied in his dungeon. Before proceeding to lay before our readers any of the passages which make up this comprehensive detail, it is proper, and indeed in some respects necessary, to apprise them, that this American bard frequently writes in a language utterly unknown to the prose or verse of this country. We have often heard it reported, that our transatlantick brethren were beginning to take it amiss that their language should still be called English; and truly we must say, that Mr. Barlow has gone far to take away that ground of reproach. The groundwork of his speech, perhaps, may be English, as that of the Italian is Latin; but the variations amount, already, to more than a change of dialect, and really make a glossary necessary for most untraveled readers. As this is the first specimen which has come to our hands of any considerable work composed in the American tongue, it may be gratifying to our philological readers, if we make a few remarks upon it. It is distinguished from the original English, in the first place, by a great multitude of words which are radically and entirely new, and as utterly foreign as if they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese: in the second place, by a variety of new compounds and combinations of words, or roots of words, which are still known in the parent tongue: and, thirdly, by the perver brumal, &c. &c. The second class is still more extensive, and, to our ears, still more discordant. In it we may comprehend such verbs as, to utilise, to vagrate, to oversheet, to empalm, to inhumanise, to transboard, to reseek, to bestorm, to ameed, &c. &c. such adjectives as bivaulted, imbeaded, unkeeled, laxed, forestered, homicidious, millennial, portless, undungeoned, lustred, &c.-conflicting fulminents; and a variety of substantives formed upon the same plan of distortion. The third, or last class of Ameri can improvements, consists mainly in the violent transformation of an incredible number of English nouns into verbs. Thus we have: "to spade the soil"" to sledge the corn”—and "to keel the water." We have, also, the verbs, to breeze, to rainbow, to hill, to scope, to lot, to lamp, to road, and to reroad, to fang, to fray, to bluff, to tone, to forester, to gyve, to besom, and fifty more. Nor is it merely as verbs that our poor nouns are compelled to serve in this new, republican dictionary; they are forced, upon a pinch, to do the duty of adjectives also; and, accordingly, we have science distinguished into moral science and physick science; and things discussed with a view to their physick forms and their final ends. The innovations in prosody, are not less bold and meritorious. We have galaxy and platina with the middle syllable long: |