of a great mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age; and which will be approached with still deeper homage, when the object to which his public life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall be broken, when a second Proccita shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a happier Rienzi sha. restore the good estate of Rome, when the streets of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient-war cry-Popolo; popolo; muoiano i tiranni!

though there may be no person to whom our misery or our happiness can be ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents itself even on those who alleviate his pain. The good-humour of a man elated by success often displays itself towards enemies. In the same manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where they do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of Egyptian idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles Sacheverells and Wilkeses. They even fall prostrate before a deity to which they have themselves given the form which commands their veneration, and which, unless fashioned by them, would have remained a shapeless block. They persuade themselves that they are the creatures of what they have themselves created. For, in fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age. Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; Of Dryden, however, as of almost every but they only pay with interest what they have man who has been distinguished either in the received. We extol Bacon, and sneer at Aquiliterary or in the political world, it may be nas. But if their situations had been changed, said that the course which he pursued, and the Bacon might have been the Angelical Doctor, effect which he produced, depended less on his the most subtle Aristotelian of the schools; personal qualities than on the circumstances the Dominican might have led forth the sciin which he was placed. Those who have ences from their house of bondage. If Luther read history with discrimination know the fal- had been born in the tenth century, he would lacy of those panegyrics and invectives, which have effected no reformation. If he had never represent individuals as effecting great moral been born at all, it is evident that the sixteenth and intellectual revolutions, subverting esta-century could not have elapsed without a great olished systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which, in ancient Rome, produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and, in modern Rome, the canonization of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore. By a law of association, from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, al

The Poetical Works of JOHN DRYDEN. In two volumes University Eduion, London, 1826.

schism in the church. Voltaire, in the days of Lewis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assail ant of the lax morality of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal had entered on his literary career, when intelligence was more general, and abuses at the same time more flagrant, when the church was polluted by the Iscariot Dubois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, and the nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law; if he had lived to see a dynasty of har. lots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army formidable only to those whom it

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It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to pieces, and who most clear. ly comprehends the manner in which all its wheels and springs conduce to its general ef fect, will be the man most competent to form another machine of similar power. In all the branches of physical and moral science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve will be able to combine. But the analysis which criticism can effect of poetry is neces

should have protected, a priesthood just religious enough to be intolerant, he might possibly, like every man of genius in France, have imbibed extravagant prejudices against monarchy and Christianity. The wit which blasted the sophisms of Escobar, the impassioned eloquence which defended the sisters of Port Royal, the intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by Papal authority, might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the Philosophical Church. It was long dis-sarily imperfect. One element must forever puted whether the honour of inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leibnitz. It is now generally allowed that these great men made the same discovery at the same time. Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached such a point, that if neither of them had ever existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to some person within a few years. So in our own time the doctrine of rent now universally received by political economists, was propounded almost at the same moment, by two writers unconnected with each other. Preceding speculators had long been blundering round about it; and it could not possibly have been missed much longer by the most heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans, that without Columbus America would have been discovered, that without Locke we should have possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas. Society indeed has its great men and its little men, as the earth has its mountains and its valleys. But the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected. The sun illuminates the hills, while it is still below the horizon; and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a light, which, without their assist ance, must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them.

elude its researches; and that is the very ele ment by which poetry is poetry. In the description of nature, for example, a judicious reader will easily detect an incongruous im age. But he will find it impossible to explain in what consists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived there from childhood; while another, employ. ing the same materials, the same verdure, the same water, and the same flowers, committing no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of a capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take another example, the great features of the character of Hotspur are obvious to the most superficial reader. We at once perceive that his courage is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his animal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary, and petulant; that he indulges his own humour without caring whose feelings he may woundor whose enmity he may provoke, by his levity. Thus far criticism will go. But soemthing is still wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his catalogue of the virtues and faults of Hot spur, and yet he would not be Hotspur. Al most every thing that we have said of him ap plies equally to Falconbridge. Yet in the mouth of Falconbridge, most of his speeches would seem out of place. Lu real life, this per petually occurs. We are sensible of wide dif ferences between men whom, if we are required to describe them, we should describe in almost the same terms. If we were attempting to draw The same remark will apply equally to the elaborate characters of them, we should scarcefine arts. The laws on which depend the pro-ly be able to point out any strong distinction; yet gress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste, are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. With out a just apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded, the merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we conceive them to be

The ages in which the masterpieces of imagination have been produced, have by no means been those in which taste has been most correct. It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection. The causes of this phenomenon it is not difficult to assign.

we approach them with feelings altogether dissimilar. We cannot conceive of them as using the expressions or gestures of each other. Let us suppose that a zoologist should attempt to give an account of some animal, a porcupine for instance, to people who had never seen it. The porcupine, he might say, is of the genus mammalia, and the order gliris. There are whiskers on its face; it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five behind, two foreteeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with hair and quills. And when all this had been said, would any one of the auditors have formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would any two of them have formed the same idea? There might exist innumerable races of ani mals, possessing all the characteristics which have been mentioned, yet altogether unlike to each other. What the description of our natu

ralist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of greatest of human calamities, without once vio criticism are to the images of poetry. What lating the reverence due to it; at that discrimi it so imperfectly decomposes, it cannot per- nating delicacy of touch which makes a charac fectly reconstruct. It is evidently as impossi- ter exquisitely ridiculous without impairing its ble to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by re-worth, its grace, or its dignity. In Don Quixote versing an analytical process so defective as are several dissertations on the principles of it would be for an anatomist to form a living poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in man out of the fragments of his dissecting the whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour room. In both cases, the vital principle eludes and attention; and no passages in any work the finest instruments, and vanishes in the with which we are acquainted are more worth. very instant in which its seat is touched. less and puerile. In our time they would scarcely Hence those who, trusting to their critical obtain admittance into the literary department skill, attempt to write poems, give us not im- of the Morning Post. Every reader of the Di ages of things, but catalogues of qualities. vine Comedy must be struck by the veneration Their characters are allegories; not good men which Dante expresses for writers far inferior and bad men, but cardinal virtues and deadly to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from sins. We seem to have fallen among the ac- the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all quaintances of our old friend Christian: some- whose works are not worth the worst of his times we meet Mistrust and Timorous: some- own hundred cantos. He does not venture to times Mr. Hate-good and Mr. Love-lust; and walk in the same line with the bombastic Stathen again Prudence, Piety, and Charity. tius. His admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry. If indeed it had been excited by the elegant, splendid and harmonious diction of the Roman poet, it would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is rather as an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of imagination, that he values the Æneid. The most trivial passages he regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of the most recondite meaning. He describes his conductor as the sea of all wisdom, the sun which heals every disordered sight. As he judged of Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century judged of him; they were proud of him; they praised him; they struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled for the honour of pos sessing his remains; they maintained professors to expound his writings. But what they admired was not that mighty imagination which called a new world into existence, and made all its sights and sounds familiar to the

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets is generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets, is not perhaps equally evident. But the fact is, that poetry requires not an examining, but a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, and write it best, who forget that it is a work of art; to whom its imitations, like the realities from which they are taken, are subjects not for connoisseurship, but for tears and laughter, resentment and affection, who are too much under the influence of the illusion to admire the genius which has produced it; who are too much frightened for Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, to care whether the pun about Outis be good or bad; who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, while they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the creations of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by treating those creations as deceptions, and by re-eye and ear of the mind. They said little of solving them, as nearly as possible, into their those awful and lovely creations on which la elements, that he becomes a critic. In the ter critics delight to dwell-Farinata lifting moment in which the skill of the artist is per- his haughty and tranquil brow from his couch ceived, the spell of the art is broken. of everlasting fire-the lion-like repose of SorThese considerations account for the absurd-dello-or the light which shone from the celes ities into which the greatest writers have fal-tial smile of Beatrice. They extolled their len, when they have attempted to give general great poet for his smattering of ancient litera rules for composition, or to pronounce judg-ture and history; for his logic and his divinity; ment on the works of others. They are unac- for his absurd physics, and his more absurd customed to analyze what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them. They feel pleasure in reading a book. They never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas, which some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link or a chain of associations, may have called up in their own minds-that they have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every schoolboy thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, and knows the lantern jaws of the Knighterrant, and the broad cheeks of the Squire, as well as the faces of his own playfellows. The most experienced and fastidious judges are amazed at the perfection of that art which extracts inextinguishable laughter from the

metaphysics; for every thing but that in which he pre-eminently excelled. Like the fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was con cealed under its foundations, they laid waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom, which existed only in their own wild reveries The finest passages were little valued till they had been debased into some monstrous allegory. Louder applause was given to the lecture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous astronomical theories, than to those remen. dous lines which disclose the secrets of the tower of hunger; or to that half-told tale c guilty love, so passionate and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contempo raries of Dante read, with less emotion than their descendants, of Ugolino groping among the wasted corpses of his children, or of Fran

cesca starting at the tremulous kiss, and drop- "Little more worth remembering occurred ping the fatal volume. Far from it. We be- during the play, at the end of which Jones askec iieve that they admired these things less than him which of the players he liked best. Tc ourselves, but that they felt them more. We this he answered, with some appearance of in should perhaps say, that they felt them too much dignation at the question, the King, without to admire them. The progress of a nation from doubt.'-'Indeed, Mr. Partridge,' says Mrs. Milbarbarism to civilization produces a change ler, 'you are not of the same opinion with the similar to that which takes place during the town; for they are all agreed that Hamlet is progress of an individual from infancy to ma- acted by the best player who was ever on the ture age. What man does not remember with stage.'-'He the best player!' cries Partridge, regret the first time that he read Robinson Cru- with a contemptuous sneer; 'why I could act soe? Then, indeed, he was unable to appreci- as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen ate the powers of the writer; or rather, he nei- a ghost, I should have looked in the very same ther knew nor cared whether the book had a manner, and done just as he did. And then, writer at all. He probably thought it not half to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, be so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-tween him and his mother, where you told me browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strina- he acted so fine, why, any man, that is any dona. He now values Fingal and Temora good man, that had such a mother, would have only as showing with how little evidence a done exactly the same. I know you are only story may be believed, and with how little merit joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I a book may be popular. Of the romance of never was at a play in London, yet I have seen Defoe he entertains the highest opinion. He acting before in the country, and the King for perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, touches, which formerly he passed by without and half as loud again as the other. Anybody notice. But though he understands the merits may see he is an actor.' of the narrative better than formerly, he is far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe which could not be brought down to the water's edge, the tent with its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and the den where the old goat died, can never again be to him the realities which they were. The days when his favourite volume set him upon making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon digging caves and fencing huts in the garden, can never return. Such is the law of our na-present a depraved character finely, instead of ture. Our judgment ripens, our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the pleasures of close investigation and those of agreeable error. We cannot sit at once in the front of the stage and behind the scenes. We cannot be under the illusion of the spectacle, while we are watching the movements of the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.

In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong place; but he trem bles in the right place. It is indeed because ho is so much excited by the acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthing performer, who personates the King. So, we have heard it said, that in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who should re

calling down the applauses of the audience, is hissed and pelted without mercy. It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment, thought that Shylock or Iago was standing be fore us. While the dramatic art was in its infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is said that they blamed Eschylus for frightening them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells us, that when Phrynichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a penalty of a thousand drachmas, for torturing their feelings by so pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist, but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the distressing illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have treated a messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming tidings, which turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child screams with terror at the sight of a per son in an ugly mask. He has perhaps seen the mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his reason, and he entreats that it may be taken off.

The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of Partridge at the theatre, affords so complete an illustration of our proposition, that we cannot refrain from quoting some parts of it. "Partridge gave that credit to Mr. Garrick which he had denied to Jones, and fell into so violent a trembling that his knees knocked against each other. Jones asked him what was the matter, and whether he was afraid of the warrior upon the stage?-O, la, sir,' said ne, 'I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not afraid of any thing, for I know it is but a play; and if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance and in so much company; and yet if I was frightened, I am not the only person.'-'Why, who,' cries Jones, 'dost thou take to be such a coward here besides We should act in the same manner, if the thyself?''Nay, you may call me a coward if grief and horror produced in us by werks of you will; but if that little man there upon the the imagination amounted to real torture. stage is not frightened, I never saw any man But in us these emotions are comparatively frightened in my life.'... He sat with his eyes languid. They rarely affect our appetite or our fixed partly on the Ghost and partly on Hamlet, sleep. They leave us sufficiently at ease to and with his mouth open; the same passions trace them to their causes, and to estimate the which succeeded each other in Hamlet, suc-powers which produce them. Our attention is ceeded likewise in him.

speedily diverted from the images which cali

by which ideas are to be conveyed from one person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. The belief which springs from it is more absolute and undoubt ing than any which can be derived from evidence. It resembles the faith which we repose in our own sensations. Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw nothing bu. the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning Houri. The Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death, when he thought of the mead of Valhalla.

The first works of the imagination are, as we have said, poor and rude, not from the want of genius, but from the want of materials. Phidias could have done nothing with an old tree and a fish bone, or Homer with the language of New Holland.

forth our tears, to the art by which those images | the heart only knoweth, a joy with which a have been selected and combined. We applaud stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, the genius of the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility, and we are comforted. Yet, though we think that, in the progress of nations towards refinement, the reasoning powers are improved at the expense of the imagination, we acknowledge, that to this rule there are many apparent exceptions. We are not, however, quite satisfied that they are more than apparent. Men reasoned better, for example, in the time of Elizabeth than in the time of Egbert; and they also wrote better poetry. But we must distinguish between poetry and a mental act, and poetry as a species of composition. If we take it in the latter sense, its excellence depends, not solely on the vigour of the imagination, but partly also on the intruments which the imagination employs. Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may be improving, while the poetical faculty is decaying. The vividness of the picture presented to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to the vividness of the prototype which exists in the mind of the writer. In the other arts we see this clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with all the genius of Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction as to the management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of the human body, he would produce something compared with which the Highlander at the door of the snuff-shop would deserve admiration. If an uninitiated Raphael were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say, that the ear y works of Raphael are little better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination? Who can doubt that the youth of that great artist was passed amidst an ideal world of beautiful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute the difference which appears between his first rude essays, and his magnificent Transfiguration, to a change in the constitution of his mind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, it is necessary that the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey it to others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet, till he has looked with attention on the face of nature; or a great dramatist, till he has felt and witnessed much of the influence of the passions. Information and experience are, therefore, necessary; not for the purpose of strengthening the imagination, which is never so strong as in people incapable of reasoning-savages, children, madmen, and dreamers; but for the purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his conceptions to others.

In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power. So strong is the perception of what is unreal, that it often overpowers all the passions of the mind, and all the sensations of the body. At first, indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a hidden treasure, a wordless poetry, an invisible painting, a silent music, a dream of which the pains and pleasures axist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they must necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are to be supplied by the susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We all know what pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for sixpence, will afford to a little girl. She will require no other company. She will nurse it, dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up man takes half so much delight in one of the incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same manner, savages are more affected by the rude compositions of their bards than nations more advanced in civilization by the greatest masterpieces of poetry.

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination than their rude ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they produce better works of imagination. Thus, up to a certain period, the diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers stand in need. Then comes the short period of splendid and con summate excellence. And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle, poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more obvious. When the adven turer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the magical box, alt the riches of the earth, however widely dis persed, however_sacredly concealed, became visible to him. But when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body, language is to the sight of the imagination. At first it calls up a world