passage from which his imitation has been taken.  In this way, it turns out, that the book is entirely composed of scraps, borrowed from the oriental tale books, and travels into the Mahometan countries, seasoned up for the English reader with some fragments of our own ballads, and shreds of our older sermons.  The composition and harmony of the work, accordingly, is much like the pattern of that patch-work drapery that is sometimes to be met with in the mansions of the industrious, where a blue tree overshadows a shell-fish, and a gigantic butterfly seems ready to swallow up Palemon and Lavinia.  The author has the merit merely of cutting out each of his figures from the piece where its inventor had placed it, and stitching them down together in these judicious combinations.

It is impossible to peruse this poem, with the notes, without feeling that it is the fruit of much reading, undertaken for the express purpose of fabricating some such performance.  The author has set out with a resolution to make an oriental story, and a determination to find the materials of it in the books to which he had access.  Every incident, therefore, and description—­every superstitious usage, or singular tradition, that appeared to him susceptible of poetical embellishment, or capable of picturesque representation, he has set down for this purpose, and adopted such a fable and plan of composition, as might enable him to work up all his materials, and interweave every one of his quotations, without any extraordinary violation of unity or order.  When he had filled his common-place book, he began to write; and his poem is little else than his common-place book versified.

It may easily be imagined, that a poem constructed upon such a plan, must be full of cumbrous and misplaced description, and overloaded with a crowd of incidents equally unmeaning and ill assorted.  The tedious account of the palace of Shedad, in the first book—­the description of the Summer and Winter occupations of the Arabs, in the third—­the ill-told story of Haruth and Maruth—­the greater part of the occurrences in the island of Mohareb—­the paradise of Aloadin, etc., etc.—­are all instances of disproportioned and injudicious ornaments, which never could have presented themselves to an author who wrote from the suggestions of his own fancy; and have evidently been introduced, from the author’s unwillingness to relinquish the corresponding passages in D’Herbelot, Sale, Volney, etc., which appeared to him to have great capabilities for poetry.

This imitation, or admiration of Oriental imagery, however, does not bring so much suspicion on his taste, as the affection he betrays for some of his domestic models.  The former has, for the most part, the recommendation of novelty; and there is always a certain pleasure in contemplating the costume of a distant nation, and the luxuriant landscape of an Asiatic climate.  We cannot find the same apology, however, for Mr. Southey’s partiality to the drawling vulgarity of some of our old English ditties.