... Both talent and
genius.... Some passages of it, and those not a few, are of the first
order of the pathetic and descriptive.' (3) _A Syrian Tale._ Of this
book I have failed to find any trace in the _Quarterly Review_, or in
the Catalogue of the British Museum. (4) Mrs. Lefanu. Neither can I
trace this lady in the _Quarterly_. Mrs. Alicia Lefanu, who is stated to
have been a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and also her daughter,
Miss Alicia Lefanu, published books during the lifetime of Shelley. The
former printed _The Flowers, a Fairy Tale_, 1810, and _The Sons of Erin,
a Comedy_, 1812. To the latter various works are assigned, such as
_Rosard's Chain, a Poem_. (5) Mr. John Howard Payne was author of
_Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin, an Historical Tragedy_, criticized in
the _Quarterly_ for April, 1820. I cannot understand why Shelley should
have supposed this criticism to be laudatory: it is in fact unmixed
censure. As thus:--'He appears to us to have no one quality which we
should require in a tragic poet.... We cannot find in the whole play a
single character finely conceived or rightly sustained, a single
incident well managed, a single speech--nay a single sentence--of good
poetry.
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