ment, and despair. Years and ages roll over the world, yet the oldest forms of lyrical beauty are ever new—yet the same field is ever yielding new fruits, with all the unabating fertility which marked its golden prime.
The best songs are often produced by those who are not professed, or professional poets; by those who do not write at all except when the heart prompts them; by those whose compositions can never be successful except when their power of pleasing is their only recommendation. When art or ambition have any share in the production, nature, which is the essence of song-writing, is liable to be forgotten or displaced. The apparent slightness of the effort required for a song, creates a temptation more than in any other kind of poetry, to supply, by mechanical facility, what can only be produced by sincere enthusiasm. If a right standard of lyric poetry be adopted, it is manifest that it cannot be hurriedly or superficially composed. Moments of inspiration, we presume, are of rare occurrence among the best poets; and these must, in every department, be solicited and improved by reflection and labour. The comparative narrowness of the path, indeed, in this peculiar region of poetry, increases the necessity of care and consideration to avoid running into old ruts, and to discover any original tract of thought and feeling. We should expect, therefore, that no one man could possibly produce more than a very few of such compositions, and many of our most popular songs seem to be the unique productions of their authors. The orator of a single speech has been considered a prodigy; but experience would not lead us to say the same thing of a poet whose reputation rested on a single song.
In modern times, however, a variety of causes have combined to make fertility, at least, as remarkable a characteristic of lyric talent as perfection of execution. Not to mention inferior names, Burns and Moore, in our own time and that of our fathers, have each produced more songs than in other ages would have distinguished any twenty writers of genius. Burns is the reputed author or emendator of about 250 lyrics, while the songs of Moore are as the sands of the sea-shore. We strongly suspect, that to the works of the best poets who write with such fertility in a limited department, the maxim of Martial must necessarily apply: Sunt bona, sunt quædam mediocria, sunt mala plura. We lament and we condemn this consequence. We consider that any system is bad under which poetry of this description is hurriedly huddled up, and cast into the world with all its imperfections on its head, to the injury alike of the writer's reputation and the depression of the standard of poetical excellence. There will always be abundance of clippers and coiners to pass off counterfeit money on the unwary. But poets, like princes, should be niggardly of their name and countenance, and chary of depreciating the legal currency, of which they exercise the control, by issuing from their mint what has not been tried and tested as fine gold.
In the two examples to which we have referred, the inducements which led to this fault were not altogether the same. The Bard of Erin, we believe, has, in his day, received for his lyrical effusions no inconsiderable amount of currency of a more substantial kind: and, however much it may have come to, we sincerely wish it had been more. With regard to the case of our Scottish minstrel, we must say, that, after an attentive and repeated perusal of the Thomson Correspondence, we have arrived deliberately at the conviction, that pecuniary recompense was not the incentive, as it was certainly not the result, of his lyric labours. The sum of of five pounds, forced upon him by the most solemn adjurations at the commencement of his task, and five pounds more given on his deathbed, but which, we believe, was not needed, and never used, amount to a much less remuneration per song than Mr Willison Glass was in the habit of receiving from every mason-lodge or private patron with whose name he might fill up the dedication of his poetical circulars. This calculation fully exonerates Burns from any suspicion that he wrote for money; but the result was nearly the same as if his motive had been less disinterested. He was encouraged and urged by others to write songs beyond the powers of any poet's productiveness; and the humility or blind devotion of those to whom they were furnished,
