in the East, that land of flowers, and fire-flies, and harems, and all elegant possibilities of costume and colour.

'Who has not heard of the vale of Cashmere,

With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave,
Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear

As the love-lighted eyes that hang over the wave?
Here the music of prayer from a minaret swells,

Here the Magian his urn, full of perfume, is swinging;
And here, at the altar, a zone of sweet bells

Round the waist of some fair Indian dancer is ringing.' This ideal East was the very place which the graceful fancy of a love-poet would choose as the scene of delicious and soft romance. Accordingly, after a little while, the plan of a poem was constructed, in which, on the slight thread of the imaginary journey of the Indian Princess, Lalla Rookh, from Delhi to Cashmere, where her nuptials were to be celebrated with the Prince of Bucharia, various oriental tales could be strung together. The young prince himself attends in the train of his intended bride under the disguise of a poet or minstrel; and he it is that, to beguile the fair one's journey, and, at the same time, win her heart by stealth, narrates the four separate Eastern romances, entitled respectively, the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Paradise and the Peri, the Fire-Worshippers, and the Light of the Harem, which constitute the entire poem. Moore thus saved himself from the labour, which would probably have been ungenial to his muse, of carrying on one unbroken story; and, at the same time, conformed more closely in his plot to the example of real oriental writers. Indeed, generally, it is worthy of consideration, whether this habit of constructing one literary work, by stringing a succession of stories together, as in the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the Canterbury Pilgrimage of Chaucer, might not be revived with advantage.

After all, Moore's Eastern romance is, to give a new turn to Goethe's phrase, very west-oestlich. It is the East not of a real Hafiz, but of a Hafiz of Park-lane or Pall Mall, that we have around us in Lalla Rookh. True, Moore had been in the West Indies, so as to know something by experience of the scenery of all warm climes, and he also tells us that he took great pains to be accurate to oriental facts in his imagery and allusions. His words are as follows:

Having thus laid open the secrets of the workshop to account for the time expended in writing this work, I must also, in justice to my own industry, notice the pains I took in long and laboriously reading for it. To form a storehouse, as it were, of illustration purely Oriental, and so familiarize myself with its various treasures, that, as quick as fancy, on her airy spiritings, required the assistance of fact, the memory

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was ready, like another Ariel, at the 'strong bidding,' to furnish materials for the spell-work-such was, for a long while, the sole object of my studies; and whatever time and trouble this preparatory process may have cost me, the effects resulting from it, as far as the humble merit of truthfulness is concerned, have been such as to repay me more than sufficiently for my pains. I have not forgotten how great was my pleasure, when told by the late Sir James Mackintosh that he was once asked by Colonel Wilks, the historian of British India, whether it was true that Moore had never been in the East.' 'Never,' answered Mackintosh. Well, that shows me,' replied Colonel Wilks, 'that reading over D'Herbelot is as good as riding on the back of a camel.' I need hardly subjoin to this lively speech that, although D'Herbelot's valuable work was, of course, one of my manuals, I took the whole range of all such Oriental reading as was accessible to me; and became, for the time, indeed, far more conversant with all relating to that distant region, than I have ever been with the scenery, productions, or modes of life, of any of those countries lying most within my reach.'

Notwithstanding all this, and even though it is said that the Persians themselves have paid their western imitator the compliment of translating some parts of his romance, so that Moore's verses have been sung by moonlight, in Persia, as some one told him, along the streets of Ispahan, we are still pretty sure that the oriental in Lalla Rookh does not lie deep. All the appropriate tinsel and tinge is there-the turbaned heads, the tiaras, the Tibet shawls, the jewelled thrones, the tents of silk, the Shiraz wine, the cool kiosks, &c.-but these are but the tasteful artificialities of an oriental ballet, as it might be represented before a select assemblage in a cushioned metropolitan theatre. The reason of this lies in the intention and real character of the poet. A poet, like Tennyson, may be led occasionally, by the very necessity of the thought that occupies his mind, to choose an oriental subject or fantasy, as the appropriate means of expressing it; or, again, an oriental subject or fantasy having suggested itself, the mind of the poet will assume the oriental mood in the act of contemplating it, and the result will be a composition west-oestlich in the higher sense-western in its authorship, eastern in notion or essence. So it was that Keats was so fertile in poems in the spirit of the Grecian mythology; his genius working best, it would appear, when it felt itself in the supposed Hellenic mood, and surrounded itself with Hellenic associations. But the muse of the genial little Irish poet, the wee bit bodie wi' the pawkie een,' as he was once called when discerned sitting side by side with Scott in the box at an Edinburgh theatre, had no such profound sympathy with what is intellectually eastern. He was, by faculty and training, the poet of artificial life in polished social circles; to minister to the sentimental gratification of such circles was the

art in which he was born to be happy. The strains in which he
sought to please his audience might vary-his song might be sad
or merry, and the subject might be either from artificial life itself,
or from any conceivable kind of life, however rough or rural;
but in every case his compositions were conditioned by this, as
their prime requisite, that they should promote the vivacity of
festive hours in elegant and well-lit rooms. Moore, apart from
his songs, was not a poet of nature, of the real, whether in scenery
or in human passion and experience; he was a poetical composer
of scenes and feelings according to the artistic traditions of re-
fined society. Take, for example, a specimen of his acquaintance
with flowers. Nourmahal, the Light of the Harem, goes out to
gather flowers in the moonlight to be made into a wreath-
'Out she flew,

To cull each shining leaf that grew
Beneath the moonlight's hallowing beams,

For this enchanted wreath of dreams.
Anemones and seas of gold,

And new-born lilies of the river,
And those sweet flow'rets that unfold
Their buds on Camadeva's quiver;
The tube-rose, with her silv'ry light,
That in the gardens of Malay
Is call'd the mistress of the night.
So like a bride, scented and bright,

She comes out when the sun's away.
Amaranths, such as crown the maids
That wander through Tamara's shades;
And the white moon-flower as it shows
On Serendib's high crags to those
Who near the isle at evening sail,
Scenting her clove-trees in the gale;
In short all flow'rets and all plants,
From the divine amrita tree,
That blesses heaven's inhabitants
With fruits of immortality,
Down to the basil-tuft, that waves
Its fragrant blossoms over graves;
And to the humble rosemary,
Whose sweets so thanklessly are shed
To scent the desert and the dead:
All in that garden bloom, and all
Are gather'd by young Nourmahal,
Who heaps her baskets with the flowers
And leaves till they can hold no more;

Then to Namouna flies, and showers
Upon her lap the shining store.'

This is certainly very pretty and tasteful; but there is not a particle of nature in it. Observe, in comparison, how a poet like Milton gathers flowers. The quotation is from Lycidas.

'Return, Sicilian Muse,

And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowrets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,-
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honey'd showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet;
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.'

Here, according to the poet's own image, it is nature herself that furnishes the flowers; the poet goes not out to cull them, but calls on the vales and the green banks of quiet streams to throw them spontaneously hither, only bidding that the flowers shall be fit for the funereal occasion. In the other instance, it is a balletgirl that goes out, to the graceful music of the orchestra, to gather flowers for an enchanted wreath, in a brilliant operatic scene. And this is the true character of much of Moore's poetry. It is artificial poetical entertainment. The poet's province was to cater for the gratification of gay and voluptuous sentiment, for the mirth and the melancholy of boudoirs and drawing-rooms; and, in doing so, he might purvey his costumes and his accompaniments from whatever quarter he pleased. Like the French poets of last century, he might have given us a poetical romance, à la pastorale, with shepherds and shepherdesses for the heroes and heroines, his object all the while being the pleasure of the salon. But, judiciously enough, he preferred a romance à Porientale, in the representation of which he could delight the spectators by beautiful and accurate scenes from the garden and the seraglio.

Regarded in this light, as a poetical romance à l'orientale, Lalla Rookh is an extremely happy performance. There is interest in the narrative, variety and oriental splendour in the scenes, and

grace, fluency, and rhythm in the diction. In the first of the four tales, the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, there is even something more-a power of historical imagination, which shows that Moore did possess melodramatic genius, and could deal, in a masterly manner, with the fanatical grandeurs of a Mahommedan legend. The story of the false prophet, Mokanna, and his hideous end, as told in Moore's verse, is far superior, both in conception and in execution, to anything in Washington Irving's real accounts of the reigns of the Caliphs; while the story, incorporated therewith, of the ruined Zelica and her lover Azim, is a truly powerful piece of tragic fancy. It is in this tale of the Veiled Prophet, and in the subsequent tale of the Fire-Worshippers, that Moore puts himself most obviously in comparison with Scott as a metrical romancist. In the latter tale, the comparison is the more unavoidable, from the circumstance that the metre is the same irregular octosyllabic that Scott has generally preferred. In the proper qualities of the romancist-incident, life, motion, the stir and tramp of substantial figures-Moore, of course, falls far behind Scott, whose knights, and pages, and armed men, and feudal damsels, in Marmion and the Lady of the Lake, are far more living creatures of the imagination than the plumed Persian warriors of Lalla Rookh, and the bright-eyed maidens that peep at them through the silken network of the windows of the harem. In one quality, however, Moore excels Scott-in the sweetness and musical charm, namely, of his verse. Scott's roughness, in this respect, the ragged, careless jolt of his metre towards the final syllable of the line, must be quite perceptible to the least finical reader. Moore's verse is much more easy and finished, the sense and the measure moving on more harmoniously in cadence-though there is still even in his verse, something of that knock of the intellect against the rhyme, which is felt, particularly in the octosyllabic metre, whenever the rhyming word could have been different from the one actually chosen. The reason of this superior melodiousness of Moore's verse consists partly in the fact, that Moore had more musical talent and practice than Scott; and partly in the independent fact, that he composed more slowly and carefully, and with more of effort after minute verbal grace. He had been at all times, he says, 'a far more slow and pains-taking workman than would ever be guessed from the result;' and it only needs a comparison of a passage from the hasty and dash-disrupted verse of Byron, with a passage from so careful and finished a poet as Tennyson, to show how singularly the beauty of a piece of rhyme may be enhanced when pains are thus bestowed to establish the severest possible accord between the words and the meaning. On this