had not, any relish for higher beauties. This is the praise of Queen Anne's wils, and to this praise they are justly entitled. This was left for them to do, and they did it well. They were invited to it by the circumstances of their situation, and do not seem to have been possessed of any such bold or vigorous spirit as either to neglect or to outgo the invitation. Coming into life immediately after the consummation of a bloodless revolution, effected much more by the cool sense than the angry passions of the nation, they seem to have felt that they were born in an age of reason, rather than of fancy; and that men's minds, though considerably divided and unsettled upon many points, were in a much better temper to relish judicious argument and cutting satire, than the glow of enthusiastic passion, or the richness of a luxuriant imagination. To these accordingly they made no pretensions; but, writing with infinite good sense, and great grace and vivacity, and, above all, writing for the first time in a tone that was peculiar to the upper ranks of society, and upon subjects that were almost exclusively interesting to them, they naturally figured, at least while the manner was new, as the most accomplished, fashionable, and perfect writers which the world had ever seen; and made the wild, luxuriant, and humble sweetness of our earlier authors appear rude and untutored in the comparison. Men grew ashamed of admiring, and afraid of imitating, writers of so little skill and smartness; and the opinion became general, not only that their faults were intolerable, but that even their beauties were puerile and barbarous, and unworthy the serious regard of a polite and distinguishing age.

These, and similar considerations, will go far to account for the celebrity which those authors acquired in their day; but it is not quite so easy to explain how they should have so long retained their ascendant. One cause undoubtedly was, the real excellence of their productions, in the style which they had adopted. It was hopeless to think of surpassing them in that style; and, recommended as it was, by the felicity of their execution, it required some courage to depart from it and to recur to another, which seemed to have been so lately abandoned for its sake. The age which succeeded, too, was not the age of courage or adventure. There never was, on the whole, a quieter time than the reigns of the two first Georges, and the greater part of that which ensued. There were two little provincial rebellions indeed, and a fair proportion of foreign war; but there was nothing to stir the minds of the people at large, to rouse their passions, or excite their imaginations--nothing like the agitations of the Reformation in the 16th century, or of the civil wars in the 17th. They went on, ac-cordingly, minding their old business, and reading their old books, with great patience and stupidity: and certainly there never was so remarkable a dearth of original talent-so long an interruption of native genius—as during about sixty years in the middle of the last century. The dramatic art was dead fifty years before, and poetry seemed verging to a similar extinction. The few sparks that appeared, however, showed that the old fire was burnt out, and that the altar must hereafter be heaped with fuel of another quality. Gray, with the talents, rather of a critic than a poetwith learning, fastidiousness, and scrupulous delicacy of taste, instead of fire, tenderness, or invention-began and ended a small school, which we could scarcely have wished to become permanent-admirable in many respects as some of its productions are being far too elaborate and artificial, either for grace or for fluency, and fitter to excite the admiration of scholars.

than the delight of ordinary men. However, they had the merit of not being in any degree French, and of restoring to our poetry the dignity of seriousness, and the tone at least of force and energy. The Whartons, both as critics and as poets, were of considerable service in discrediting the high pretensions of the former race, and in bringing back to public notice the great stores and treasures of poetry which lay hid in the records of our ancient literature. Akenside attempted a sort of classical and philosophical rapture, which no elegance of language could easily have rendered popular, but which had merits of no vulgar order for those who could study it. Goldsmith wrote with perfect elegance and beauty, in a style of mellow tenderness and elaborate simplicity. He had the harmony of Pope without his quaintness, and his selectness of diction without his coldness and eternal vivacity. And, last of all, came Cowper, with a style of complete originality,—and, for the first time, made it apparent to readers of all descriptions, that Pope and Addison were no longer to be the models of English poetry.

In philosophy and prose writing in general, the case was nearly parallel. The name of Hume is by far the most considerable which occurs in the period to which we alluded. But though his thinking was English, his style is entirely French; and being naturally of a cold fancy, there is nothing of that eloquence or richness about him, which characterises the writings of Taylor, and Hooker, and Bacon-and continues, with less weight of matter, to please in those of Cowley and Clarendon. Warburton had great powers, and wrote with more force and freedom than the wits to whom he succeeded; but his faculties were perverted by a paltry love of paradox, and rendered useless to mankind by an unlucky choice of subjects, and the arrogance and dogmatism of his temper. Adam Smith was nearly the first who made deeper reasonings, and more exact knowledge popular among us; and Junius and Johnson the first who again familiarised us with more glowing and sonorous diction, and made us feel the tameness and poorness of the serious style of Addison and Swift.

This brings us down almost to the present times-in which the revolution in our literature has been accelerated and confirmed by the concurrence of many causes. The agitations of the French revolution, and the discussions as well as the hopes and terrors to which it gave occasion-the genius of Edmund Burke, and some others of his country-the impression of the new literature of Germany, evidently the original of our lake-school of poetry, and of many innovations in our drama-the rise or revival of a general spirit of methodism in the lower orders-and the vast extent of our political and commercial relations, which have not only familiarised all ranks of people with distant countries and great undertakings, but have brought knowledge and enterprise home, not merely to the imagination, but to the actual experience of almost every individual. All these and several other circumstances have so far improved or excited the character of our nation, as to have created an effectual demand for more profound speculation, and more serious emotion, than was dealt in by the writers of the former century, and which, if it has not yet produced a corresponding supply in all branches, has at least had the effect of decrying the commodities that were previously in vogue, as unsuited to the altered condition of the times.

Of those ingenious writers, whose characteristic certainly was not vigour, any more than tenderness or fancy, SWIFT was indisputably the most vigorous

-and perhaps the least tender or fanciful. The greater part of his works being occupied with politics and personalities that have long since lost all interest, can now attract but little attention, except as memorials of the manner in which politics and personalities were then conducted. In other parts, however, there is a vein of peculiar humour and strong satire, which will always be agreeable-and a sort of heartiness of abuse and contempt of mankind, which produces a greater sympathy and animation in the reader than the more elaborate sarcasms that have since come into fashion. Altogether his merits appear to be more unique and inimitable than those of any of his contemporaries.

COMPARISON BETWEEN ENGLISH AND FRENCH POETRY.

There is nothing in which the opinions of the French and English differ so irreconcilably as in Poetry,-and therefore, perhaps, the critics of the one nation ought not to pass judgment on the poets of the other. We can exchange our cottons for their wines-our cut-steel for their or mouluour blankets for their cambrics, and find ground for mutual satisfaction in the bargain;-but the prices current of Poetry are so outrageously different in the two countries, that we would not part with a scene of Shakspeare for the whole body of their dramatists; nor would they give up a canto of Voltaire-Henriade, or Pucelle either-for the whole of our Spenser, and Milton into the bargain.

Now, it will not do to account for this contradiction of sentiment by the mere effect of national partiality, or the habit of considering the same substantial excellences as exclusively connected with certain external accompaniments;-for both nations admit the merit of other foreign competitors. There is, in truth, a radical difference in the excellences at which they respectively aim-and each admires its own for qualities which the other disdains. There are some points of contact undoubtedly-but not many. The admirers of our Pope, in his satyrical and didactic parts at least, cannot but admire their Boileau; and those who are captivated with the tragedy of Addison, must admit, we should think, his inferiority to Racine. But we really cannot carry the parallel any farther. What is most poetical in our poetry, has no counterpart in theirs,-nor have we anything at all akin to what they chiefly boast of and value in their favourites.

If we were called upon to state, in a few words, the grand distinction of the two schools, we should probably say, that our poetry derives its materials chiefly from nature, and theirs from art-that our images are borrowed for the most part from the country, and theirs from the town-that we deal fearlessly with the primitive and universal passions of our kind, and they almost exclusively with the pretensions and prejudices of persons of rank and condition-that their great dread is to be ignoble, and ours to be insipid-their triumph to surmount difficulties, and ours to give emotion. The grand difference is the deeper sympathy we have with Nature-and

1. Méditations Poétiques. Par Alphonse Delamartine. 2. Trois Messeniennes. Elégies sur les Malheurs de la France. Deux Messeniennes sur la Vie et la Mort de Jeanne d'Arc. Par Casimir Delavigne. 3. Chansons, &c. Par J. B. Béranger.-Vol. xxxvii. p 407. November,

the greater veneration they pay to Art; and this requires a word of explanation-for all civilisation, it may be said, is art; and no nation has pursued it so far, or carried into so many departments, as the English. And this in some sense is true. But the leading distinction we take to be this: the English employ art to improve and imitate nature-the French to correct and supersede her. The one approach her with veneration, as humble ministrants to her energies, or dutiful observers of her course; the other with contempt, and as pitying her rudeness, or distrustful of her power. This is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the way in which they respectively seek to embellish their country residences. An English park is a reverend and feeling imitation of what is most beautiful in the landscapes which Nature herself has contrived in similar situations—and is effected, in truth, rather by removing the accidental obstructions that are opposed to her developement, than by subjecting her to any degree of force or constraint-by giving the trees room to assume their natural proportions-letting the grass be equally cropped by the flocks, and opening up the glades and distances in their natural gradations. A French park, on the other hand, is throughout, and in every part, an ostentatious and presumptuous attempt to supersede and expel Nature altogether, and to raise a triumph on her complete subjugation-the trees planted in square masses and pruned into regular alleys-the banks notched into terraces-the streams built into canals, or forced up into jets-and the shrubs paraded in rows of painted boxes! Among the middling and lower orders of the people, there is the same remarkable want of sympathy with nature, or respect for her. They cultivate their fields, but never adorn them-they plant, or spare, no trees for beauty-but for fuel only, or carpentry; and around their cottages you see no more blossoms and verdure without, than cleanliness or neatness within.

They have treated the human form very much as they have the landscape. It is to France we owe the horrible invention, or at least the general introduction, of such abominations as wigs, hair-powder, coats, waistcoats, and breeches, tight stays, hooped petticoats, and high heeled shoesof all, in short, that makes us laugh or shudder at the pictures of our progenitors in the last century, and that still continues to give such meanness and deformity, at least to our male figures, as to render them unfit for sculpture, and perilous even for painting. Compared with these characteristic French inventions, the ancient dress of all the European nations was both graceful and expressive-the Celtic and Sarmatian-the Spanish,-the Polish-the Venetian,-the Russian, the Norwegian. It was either ample and flowing, to give dignity and grace to the figure; or tight and succinct, to express its form and favour its activity. The French, by which it has been unluckily superseded, has no character at all, but that of heaviness, meanness, and constraint. The same antipathy to nature led them to repress and overwhelm her with their helps and ornaments, almost from the first moment of birth. Infants were manacled in swaddling clothes, and scarcely allowed to walk till they were taught to dance. The lectures of Rousseau, and their recent passion for having every thing 'à la Grecque,' have at last produced some relenting; but we can ourselves remember, when every well-born male of seven years old had a tail fastened to the hinder part of its head, and a toupet on its front, with rows of stiff curls en ailes de pigeon on each side,—while every female form of the same age was compressed in whalebone stays and iron busks, to the danger of suffocation; and all these

little wretches, with the manners, language, and gestures of persons of sixty, paid set compliments to the company, in the second and fourth positions!

It was, of course, impossible that this contempt for nature should not appear in their poetry, and their delineations of passion and character. Accordingly, their love is not love but gallantry-their heroism not much better than ostentation and the chief concern of their poetical personages, in all their agitations, is rather to maintain their consideration among people of their own condition, than to express those emotions which level all conditions, and overwhelm all vanities in the tide of impetuous feeling.

These considerations go far to explain why French poetry should be different from ours and, we must add, inferior to it—and that from causes that belong to the general character and habits of the nation. We must be permitted to say farther, that they appear, in this as in every thing else, to have less force of Imagination, and a less elevated Taste, than most other polished nations incredible as these imputations must appear in their

ears.

That the French lay claim to a greater portion of imagination than has been bestowed on any other people, may be learned from the gentle accusations they prefer against themselves in certain emergencies; for, in truth, nothing ever goes amiss with them but by an excess of this quality! When they draw too hasty conclusions in argument, or venture imprudently in battle-when they linger under despotism out of love to their Sovereign, or overshoot the boundaries of human liberty out of philanthropy-when they exterminate a rival sect, or deny the existence of a God-when, in a single moment, they become all or any thing to excess, they lay it to the account of that uncontrollable vivacity which hurries them away. . 'Nous autres Français nous avons des tétes si vives! nous avons tant d'imagination!'—that they cannot submit to the rule and compass, like the dull races around them. In short, the only defect in their character is too lavish a proportion of the highest faculty with which creative genius is endowed! The regularity with which we conduct the common concerns of life; the guardian forms with which we surround the dearest of our public blessings, are, in their opinion, but so many proofs that the English have no imagination; though in their most indulgent humour, they allow we are good machines ourselves, and have produced some that are not altogether contemptible. This, however, is of less consequence; but it is quite necessary to observe, that imagination may be predominant in two different cases. The one is when it really is very abundant; the other, when its antagonist faculty is so weak as to be easily subdued. Now, the antagonist faculty of imagination is judgment, or the vulgar thing called common sense. A very little imagination, therefore, joined to a very little common sense, may, in many respects, produce the same derangement of balance as a large portion of imagination with a large portion of common sense; and we suspect it would not be difficult to refer to instances in which imagination seem to act too great a part in French affairs, only because reason acts too little.

The language of common life abounds in small metaphors, suited to its small occasions; and we should think it ridiculous either to increase their number, or to exchange them for loftier tropes. Yet, one great exercise of French imagination is in this department. The story which Sterne relates of his French barber who proposed immersing his periwig in the ocean, to show that damp could not uncurl it, is not a bad specimen of such grandiloquism. Dipping it in a pail of water would have been more