The Sun.
London, England, 1832-10-12 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

THE POETIC NEGLIGEE.
BY CALEB. LONDON, 1832.
Poetry, like puns, should be either very good
or very bad ; either so good as to electrify you
with admiration, or so bad as to half kill you with
laughter. It is the great boast of " Caleb," who
pleads guilty to the volume before us, that his
verse is of the latter order. There is nothing of
mediocrity about it ; it possesses the rare merit
of superlative absurdity. The volume, however,
comes recommended by the charms of a most
captivating exterior, rose-coloured paper with
gilt edges, and topography, without drawback
or blemish. Alas, that the outer Adam should
so far exceed the inner,—that the one should be
merely, as it were, a masque to conceal the de-
fects of the other ! " Caleb" will never make a
poet; of this he may rest assured. He may,
indeed, in process of time, by dint of hard study,
and the frequent use of his ten fingers, come to
grind verses with tolerable facility, but he will
never turn up the rich ore of poetry, for he is
totally deficient in what Wordsworth so aptly
terms" the vision and the faculty divine." We
like him best where he affects to be facetious
his sentimental flights are irresistibly ludicrous,
as if a tom-tit should attempt to sing like a
nightingale. One of his most elaborate effusions,
on which it is manifest he piques himself, is de-
scribed with suitable pomp of detail, as having
been written " the morning after waltzing with
Agnes." It opens in this sonorous style,—
" But yesternight I lovely Agnes met
At crowded ball, and by her side I sat;
Conversed of trifles! 'till I dancing named
(For which my Agnes is so justly famed,)
When music breathing, we the conch forsook,
And quick our places 'midst the waltzers took."
" Caleb"—the name forcibly reminds us of
our old acquaintance in the farce, " Caleb Quo-
tem,"—goes on to invoke, not the Muse, but
" glowing language," while he paints all the
charms of Agnes, in the exercise of which duty
he says,
" As through the labyrinth of this dance divine
We glide, our limbs each other's close entwine,
And like the tendril in its fond caress
As mutual stay, my knee to hers I press."
What, kiss and tell? Fie, fie, Caleb ? What
will " Agnes" say when she finds that you have
told a " discerning public " that you have pressed
your knees to hers, and instituted a close inter-
course of limbs ? Do you think she will ever
waltz with you again, man ? Never ! Having
finished his first preliminary movement, Caleb
and his Agnes plunge at once into the more
subtle mysteries of the waltz, in the progress of
which Agnes treads on Caleb's corns, or as he
more poetically and pleonastically expresses it,
" Thro' oft-told circles we enraptured wind,
Yet true to skill, her foot on mine 'find."
He then (the waltz concluded) bethinks him
of his duty,
" Whilst my fond duty is to swiftly bear
Her, half recumbent, thro' the perfumed air."
Of the " perfumed air" of a crowded draw-
ing room, with the thermometer at blood-heat,
we say nothing, but the " half recumbent," had
we the faculty of blushing left, would assuredly
crimson our cheeks. Caleb, however, who is
evidently a bit of a Don Juan, thinks nothing
of it, for he assures us, a few lines afterwards,
that he is " the aptest pupil in this school of
love." Indeed, in his very next poem, which lie
entitles the " Rejected," he tells us,
" My love, like her that gave it birth,
Has not its likeness upon earth ;
I love not, 0, I cannot love
As other beings do.
Mine is the soul's idolatry
As fierce as it is true."
Touching confession ! And yet the man who
writes thus sweetly and plaintively, who loves
after a fashion of his own, in noble disdain of
all the acknowledged laws of sentiment, who
confesses that lie is a great original in the school
of Cupid,—this man has been rejected ! But he
has one consolation left, he tells us, which is the
" grave ;" though notwithstanding his wounded
sensibilities he can scarcely make up his mind
to this last awkward alternative, for
" o heaven, 'tis hard to die,
To perish—for one's constancy."
" Uncommon hard," as Ensign Northerton
phrases it ; wherefore, if Caleb will take our
advice, he will at once cut and run from the
" fair she," who has so unceremoniously jilted
him, and look out for some more charitable mis-
tress. But Caleb, we suspect, deserves his fate,
for according to his own showing, be has been a
sad dog with the women. Thus in a dark
" Lusitanian grove" he tells us—
" I sweetly slaked my raging thirst,
With luscious draughts of love."
At Cintra too—
" From red and roscid lips I quaffed
The kiss of deep delight."
In Spain—
" Her fondest ones I met,
And felt the flash that lightens from
Their eyes of molten jet."
But Caleb's intrigues were not confined to
Christendom, he actually invaded a Moslem
seraglio:
" And oh, while memory lives, I'll dream,
At least, of one dark flower
That bloom'd for me, and me alone,
Within its Moorish bower."
This " flower," it seems, was African ; a
" Hottentot Venus" probably, whose dusky
charins palling upon her seducer, lie quitted her
for the more voluptuous dames of India. " I
pilgrimed," quoth he—
" Where the burning sun
Of distant Indus shines,
And told my beads of passion there
At bright and living shrines."
From India he started off on an amorous ex-
pedition to Italy :
" In fair Italia's mellow clime,
The clime of soft desire,
Like to its own impassion'd mount,
I burned with hidden fire."
In short, says Caleb—
" In every soft and sunny smile,
Where beauty builds her nest,
And fervent man delights to make
His heaven, sweet woman's breast ;
I've dwelt awhile and banquetted
On lover's dainty fare."
Were it not an acknowledged truism that poets
succeed better in fiction than in truth, we should
consider Caleb as a " lady•killer" far too dan-
gerous and sweeping in his passions to be safely
let loose in a metropolis like this, which abounds
such provocatives to an amorous appetite.
But Caleb is not only a seducer, he is also a
war, of the first water. Hear the funny dog's
witticisms on the " Siamese Twins!"
" Fraternal clingings in our land
At best are but unstable,
But ye, 'tis pleasing to behold,
Are quite inseparable."
The poem of (( Wimbledon" is wholly of a

pathetic, retrospective character. Caleb, it
appears, had not visited it since the days of his
unbewhiskered juvenility, when his

" Boyish fancy oft would paint
Each girl sincere, each man a saint,"

consequently he is much struck with the al-
terations that have taken place, which he is of
opinion are far from being improvements.—His
lines on the death of the Queen of the Sandwich
Islands are remarkable for their deep melancholy.
It is impossible for any reader, endowed with an
average proportion of pathos, to peruse the
following stanza without weeping :

" Land of Sandwiches attend
To the tristful and the true,
For I've grisly news to send
Of Queen Tamehanialu.
Alas ! she is gone dead,
And the spear no longer wields,
But now rests her regal head,
In Saint Martin's-in-the-fields !"

The closing touch about St. Martin's-in-the-
Fields is irresistible. It combines sentiment
with topography in the happiest style imaginable.
Turn we now to Caleb's prose, which he
pours forth, in the shape of notes, at the
nether-end of his volume. This, we fearlessly
contend, is equal in originality to his poetry.
En voici. The author is rhapsodizing on his
favourite subject of woman :

" From the cradle to the grave, woman is the fond and en-
dearing comforter of man. Through the gentle gradations of
mother, sweetheart, and wife, she ministers to his weal and
enjoyment. Firstly, she is the parent rose that buds him into
being, and hovers round his giddy boyhoood ; secondly, she is
lapped in his youthful heart-strings in all the pride and bloom
of puberty ; and, thirdly, she fills up the measure of his bliss
by becoming the partner of his bosom, and dulcifying his
riper years ; while, as the closing virtue of her adorable sex,
she cheers and solaces him in the wintry downhill of life. If,
then, such a lovely anti estimable creature be taught by any
religion (or rather libel on religion) to consider celibacy as a
holy state, or a pious abstinence, finding propitiousness at the
porch of Heaven, I fearlessly maintain that her reason and na-
ture have been most hellishly perverted, and that if one pu-
nishment more terrible than another be reserved for the tor-
tures of the damned, that refinement of agony awaits the guilty
souls of the foul and unnatural instructors. But the idea is
in itself too monstrous and wicked to be patiently entertained,
and shivering the parology to nought, with the divine command
of "increase and multiply."

We suppose it is in consequence of Caleb's
virtuous horror of celibacy, that he sat out on
that amorous crusade through the four quarters of
the globe, of which we have before made the ho-
nourable mention it deserves. Let not, however,
Caleb be too practical in his hatred to celibacy,
and his obedience to the divine command of
" increase and multiply," or haply the parish
officers may be after him with an order of affi!i-
ation—an awkward catastrophe For a young man
of a sentimental and romantic turn of mind.
But we must here break off. To be serious,
then, " the Poetic Negligee" is sad trash, full of
pert flippancy, and mawkish attempts at senti-
ment. Its poetry is worse than anything we know
of, except its prose. We will not be positive,
but we are not without our suspicions, that its
author is a tailor, for he makes repeated reference
to " measu res," and other such phrases, symp-
tomatic of the craft. If so, we conjure him, as
his best friend, to lay aside his pen, and stick
to his shop-board. It is far easier to make a
coat than a poem. Poeta nascitur, non fit ;
which is, being interpreted,—Caleb will never
manufacture a poem ft for public perusal.

LARDNER'S CABINET CYCLOPEDIA.
No. XXXV. LONDON. 1832.

This number forms a continuation of the
History of Spain and Portugal, of which three
volumes have already been published. The best
and most animated portions are decidedly those
which have reference to Spain under the dynasty
of the Mahomedans. But this, perhaps, be-
cause the subject is so pre-eminently interesting.