cause it to be reprinted,—since it is a second edition "with additions and emendations" that I now have before me. Mr. Snelling tells us how he heard
. . . . a voice that cries, "Lift up thine hand
Against the legions of this locust band;
Let brain-sick youths the wholesome scourge endure;
Their case is urgent. Spare not! Kill or cure!
Hang, hang them up, like smelts upon a string,
And o'er their books a requiescat sing:
Arise!—convince thy country of her shame;
Rise, ere her genius be no more a name!"
Rous'd by the call of Duty, I obey;
I draw the sword, and fling the sheath away.
And with the blade thus drawn, Mr. Snelling runs amuck amid the minor American authors of his day, hewing and hacking, and yet not revealing any gift of swordsmanship which would let him wound with a sharp epithet or kill with a piercing couplet. Here is a sample of his execution wrought upon the once popular N. P. Willis:
Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford
To give poor Natty P. his meet reward?
What has he done to be despised by all
Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall?
Why, as in bandbox trim, he walks the streets,
Turns up the nose of every man he meets,
As if it scented carrion? Why, of late,
Do all the critics claw his shallow pate?
Far more agreeable is it to quote Snelling's eulogy of Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose fame is now sadly faded:
Dear Halleck, wither'd be the hands that dare
One laurel from thy nobler brow to tear;
Accept the tribute of a muse inclin'd
To bow to nothing, save the power of mind.
Bard of Bozzaris, shall thy native shore
List to thy harp and mellow voice no more?
Shall we, with skill like thine so near at hand,
Import our music from a foreign land?
While Mirror Morris chants in whimpering note,
And croaking Dana strains his screech-owl throat;
While crazy Neal to metre shakes his chains,
And fools are found to listen to his strains,
Wilt thou be silent? Wake, O Halleck, wake!
Thine and thy country's honor are at stake;
Wake, and redeem the pledge; thy vantage keep;
While Paulding wakes and writes, shall Halleck sleep?
Snelling has words of praise also for Bryant, but he falls foul of Whittier; and he delights in abuse of the first efforts of the native American dramatists, especially deriding Stone, who had just devised Metamora for Edwin Forrest.
It was not Snelling's forgotten "Truth" which evoked the next and the best of American literary satires—the only one, indeed, which has a permanent value. The immediate cause of the "Fable for Critics" seems to have been Leigh Hunt's "Feast of the Poets," although the influence of Goldsmith's "Retaliation" is also apparent. Indeed, it is only in "Retaliation" that we can find a gallery of lightly limned contemporary portraits worthy of comparison with the collection contained in the "Fable." Perfect as is Goldsmith's portrayal of Burke and Reynolds and Garrick, it is not finer or truer than Lowell's depicting of Irving or of Cooper, or than the companion pictures of Emerson and Carlyle. In his affectionate essay on Dryden, Lowell quotes Dryden's assertion that Chaucer was "a perpetual fountain of good sense," only to suggest that the phrase may be applied to Dryden himself; it fits the American critic-poet almost as well as the British poet-critic. Half a century is it since Lowell narrated his "Fable"; and even at this late date his criticism seems to us to be rarely at fault.
Not only did he set forth, fifty years ago, an opinion of his contemporaries anticipating the judgment of the twentieth century, but he chose with unerring instinct the writers whom it was worth while to consider.
Of course there are those who hold that the machinery of the fable creaks a little, that the rattling rhymes run away with the lyrist more than once, that the rhythm is somewhat rugged now and again, that the puns are not always as expensive as they might be, that there are other blemishes to be detected by a severe critic. But ever against these trifling defects set the brilliant truth
