LITERARY PREDICTIONS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 214, 1 June 1877, Page 13

LITERARY PREDICTIONS.

A well-known writer in the seventeenth century — William WinStanley — in his "Lives of the English Poets," thus speaks and prophesies of Milton ; "John Milton was one whose natural part a might deservedly give him a place among the principal of our English poets, having written two heroic poems and a tragedy. But his fame has gone out like a candle in a snuff, and bis memory will always stink." One of the most illustrious of Milton's brother bards, E (mund Waller, in one of his letters, refers to " Paradise Lost" as a tedious poem by the blind old schoolmaster; in which there is nothing remark ible but its length. Horai-e Walpole, as shrewd a man and as accomplished a critic as ever lived, has obligingly informed us who were the *' first writers " in 1793. Posterity would probably guess with Macaulay that they were Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray. Not at all. They were, according to a contemporiiry, Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. William Whitehead, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyngs, Mr. Cambridge, and Mr. Coventry — that is to say, a pack of scribblers, only one of whom is known even by name to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred — Lord Chesterfield — and he is remembered chiefly as tlie ninepin of Dr. Johnson and Cowper. George Steevens as remarked that nothing short of an Act of Parliament would induce people to read the sonnets of Shakspeare, and Johnson prophesied a safe immortality for Pomphret's famous " Choice." Evi»ry one knows how the great Edinburgh received Byron's first attempts, and what it " prophesied " concerning him. Whnn Dickens brought out " Pickwick," a leading review, condescending to notice the '* low Cockney tale," shrewdly perceived that the author was already proving himself unequal, and that the " thin vein of humor " was rapidly shoeing signs of exhaustion. In the author of " JEuone," *■ Locksley Hall," iind "The Lotus Eaters," the keen and searching critical acumen of the Quarterly could only see a miuor star of that " Galaxy or milky way of poetry of which the lamented K^ats was the harbinger," ami the future author of the " Idylls" and " In Memoriam" was received with peals of laughter, aud consigned placidly to oblivion. — Globe.