Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/358

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HENRY JAMES PYE.

catalogued precisely in Watt's "Bibliotheca Britannica." They are many of them to be found in the British Museum, in libraries at country houses, and to be picked up at book-stalls. Notwithstanding the elaborate jocosity which we have before quoted at the expense of his version of "Tyrtæus," some of the translations are very spirited. There are smooth and pretty verses in his "Hymns and Epigrams of Homer." His "Carmen Seculare" is musical and rhetorical verse, occasionally bombastic, and the preface to it contains a discussion like the one which appeared in the newspaper three years ago, whether January 1st, 1800, or January 1st, 1801, is the first day of the nineteenth century.

Besides Pye's poetical productions, he wrote more than once for the stage, translated a work from the German, and published a translation of the "Poetics of Aristotle," with a commentary. It is a curious and not uninteresting book, full of gossipping anecdote and colloquial criticism. It occasionally degenerates into feeble garrulity, as, for instance, his defence of the ladies against Aristotle's definition, and Twining's comment upon it. As a critic, he is usually candid, but not severe. He speaks of one of Warton's odes as "one of the most beautiful and original descriptive poems in our language." Of two of his earlier predecessors he says in terms less eulogistic, "Cibber possessed a genius not above mediocrity, and Tate was an indifferent poet." Pye had a very warm admiration for Thompson, and wrote a "Sonnet on a Villa at Rosedale, Richmond," once the property of that poet. His "Comments on the Commentations of Shakespeare," is a readable little book, full of short notes on the various plays. He treats the Commentators somewhat uncivilly, and is especially bilious against Warburton. The work called forth a letter in the "Gentleman's Magazine," in which the writer complains