often sat beside the dying, watching the eventful moment of death; but he had never witnessed so tedious a departure as in this patient. For two days life and death struggled together. Often she lay surrounded by her friends, pale and breathless, and life, to all appearance, entirely extinguished; when suddenly she would open her eyes, look up, breathe more strongly, and seem again recalled to existence. This happened so repeatedly, that Dr Nasse, who at first had considered itas perhaps depending on the state of the lungs of the patient, became more attentive and anxious to find out the cause of so singular a circumstance. To his astonishment, he discovered that the sudden recall to life never failed to take place every time the patient's husband entered the room; and as soon as he left it, she again sank down pale and exhausted. This was so remarkable, that it did not escape her husband's observation, and he was very desirous to renew the magnetical operations. But Dr Nasse thought it improper to continue it to the very brink of the grave; and therefore Mr Zimmermann, yielding to the arguments and persuasions of Dr Nasse, quitted the room for a considerable time, and permitted his wife to depart in peace.
The communication which precedes this, by Nasse, is an account, by Dr Tritschler of Carmstadt, of a boy of thirteen years of age, cured in an astonishing manner by Animal Magnetism. But as this case is given at great length, I shall reserve the abridgement of it for your next Number. In the mean time, I leave your readers to make their own comments, on the short specimens of magnetical prophecy and physic, which have now been given.
ON THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY,
No I.
Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on)
Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
(Our England's Dante)—Wordsworth—Hunt, and Keats,
The Muses son of promise; and of what feats
He yet may do.
While the whole critical world is occupied with, balancing the merits whether in theory or in execution, of what is commonly called The Lake School, it is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of The Cockney School. Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects. He is a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaïre nor Phédre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing comparable, Mr Hunt is an absolute stranger. Of Spanish books he has read Don Quixote (in the translation of Motteux), and some poems of Lope de Vega in the imitations of my Lord Holland. Of all the great critical writers, either of ancient or of modern times, he is utterly ignorant, excepting only Mr Jeffrey among ourselves.
With this stock of knowledge, Mr Hunt presumes to become the founder of a new school of poetry, and throws away entirely the chance which he might have had of gaining some true poetical fame had he been less lofty in his pretensions. The story of Rimini is not wholly undeserving of praise. It possesses some tolerable passages, which are all quoted in the Edinburgh Reviewer's account of the poem, and not one of which is quoted in the very illiberal attack upon it in the Quarterly. But such is the wretched taste in which the greater part of the work is executed, that most certainly no
