POETRY.

The difficulty of giving a definition of poetry, which shall include all that essentially belongs to it, and exclude all that is foreign or accidental to it, has been long felt and admitted. The definition of the ancients, which makes poetry “an imitative art,” is obviously exposed to the double objection of being at once too comprehensive, since it would equally apply to the other imitative arts of pointing and sculpture; and too limited, since it would exclude many departments of poetry, in which, as in the lyrical, the art is not properly imitative, but expressive ; not copying in any sense the thoughts and actions of others, but presenting to the sympathy of the reader the emotions of the poet himself. Not less objectionable is the definition, that poetry is “the art· of expressing our thoughts by fiction ;” which, while it is equally applicable to the novel and the romance, is, in fact, not necessarily true of poetry at all, except in this sense, that in all high poetry a certain transforming and beautifying power of imagination is excited, which in some measure transmutes the forms of things from their actual prosaic aspect,

Clothing the palpable and the familiar With golden exhalations of the dawn.

Still less can verse or metrical form be regarded as constituting the essence, or even one of the essentials, of poetry. It no doubt heightens its effect; it increases its charm and power of pleasing, by enlisting the aid of musical sound and cadence on the side of imaginative language or touching sentiment; but it must yet be regarded as amongst the externals of poetry,—something which will never make poetry of itself, and without which poetry is not only conceivable, but has in fact existed, and that in very striking and impressive forms.

Poetry may perhaps be defined to be an art which has creation of intellectual pleasure for its object, which attains its end by the use of language natural in an excited state of the imagination and t the feelings, and generally, though 1 not necessarily, formed into regular numbers. The proper antithesis, therefore, to poetry, as Mr Coleridge has remarked, is not prose, but science. The proper antithesis to prose is verse. Science seeks to instruct, to discover and to communicate truth; “the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.” Poetry may indeed incidentally instruct, as science may indirectly communicate pleasure; but the object of each must be gathered from its main direction and bearing, and in this sense the production of intellectual enjoyment is unquestionably the aim and the proper province of poetry.

But so closely are the intellectual and refined pleasures of man connected with his moral qualities; so much does 1 his relish for the higher and more spiritual pleasures of the imagination depend on a sound and healthy state of morality in the first instance, and so much is this state in turn promoted and encouraged by stimulating and keeping alive the activity of the imagination and the sensibilities of the heart, that poetry, though generally avoiding the form of direct instruction, may yet be said, with justice, to be the most important handmaid and assistant of moral education, by its appeals to those affections which are apt to become indolent and dormant amidst the commerce of the world, and the revival of those purer and more enthusiastic feelings which are associated with the earlier and least selfish period of our existence. Immersed in business, which, if it sharpen the edge of intellect, leaves the heart barren; toiling after material wealth or power, or struggling with fortune for existence; seeing selfishness reflected all around us from the hard and glittering surface of society, as from a cold and polished mirror; it would go hard with man in adversity, perhaps still more in prosperity, if some resource were not provided for him, which, under the form of an amusement and a recreation, administered a secret but powerful balm in the one case, and an antidote in the other. This resource is afforded us by the influences of poetry. “Whatever withdraws ns from the power of the senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, and the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of human beings.” Sometimes, no doubt, poetry openly assumes the garb of morality, but it is generally least instructive when most directly didactic, and practically attains the end of instruction with most success when the instructor is himself unconscious of the lesson he conveys. In an indirect form, however, and through the medium of the feelings and the imagination rather than the mere reason, its efficiency as a moral agent is great and undeniable. And as upon the intellectual worth and nobleness of individuals depends the standard of a national morality, it may with truth be said that the fame and character of nations,—those qualities the presence of which makes the smallest state conspicuous in the world’s eye, and the absence of which renders the widest empire, on which the sun never sets, insignificant; namely, national pride, honour, fidelity to engagements, courage to act, fortitude to suffer, a generous and far-seeing policy, disdaining all mean or questionable advantages; are to some extent derived, and, at all events, continually cherished and fostered, by the influence of a pure and ennobling national poetry. If Plato had succeeded in banishing poets from his ideal republic, he would assuredly have conferred no benefit upon morals. He would have created a hard and utilitarian frame of society, inaccessible to generous feeling, and incapable of those great efforts, either of action or of endurance, which have their source only in enthusiasm, and cannot be suggested by any principle of expediency, however enlarged may be the basis of calculation.

It is the conviction of this intimate though indirect connection between poetry and morality, and the consequent bearing of the former upon human welfare, that explains the veneration which mankind have always felt for those poets who, acting under an impression ðf the sacredness of the task committed to them, and of the power of the talisman which genius has placed in their hands, have devoted their labours to the purest forms of poetry, and to the excitement of emotions, either virtuous in themselves, or conducive to virtue. It is this conviction which accounts for the aversion which they have never failed in the end to manifest against all those who have made the fascinations of poetry and wit subservient to the gratification of baser feelings or meaner propensities. For men taken in the mass judge rightly, even when they act wrongly; and moral opinion, so variable and wavering when applied to our own case or that of our friends, is found a safe and steady guide when applied to the mere representation of human thought and action in the forms with which they are invested by the poet. Hence the feelings of all men are enlisted and warmly ex-, cited on the side of virtue in fictitious composition, and still more in the most fascinating form of fictitious composition, poetry. For here the tendency of the poem is felt to be no mere speculative question, but a real dispute “pro aris et focis ;” a contest whether, as is said to be often the case in India, poison is to be conveyed into the wells from which pure and refreshing water ought to be drawn. And this practical bearing upon important interests, of the abuse of [7:18:141]a fine art, is more felt, and justly, in poetry than in any other. In painting, for instance, Parrhasius, Julio Romano, Annibal Caraeci, and Titian, have ministered by their pictures to the promotion of vice; some have even endeavoured to pervert the pure marble into a vehicle of impure representations: but the circle of their operation is limited; to the mass of men their iniquities of this nature are even unknown: but poetry, multiplied indefinitely by printing, finding its way into every quarter of the globe, and penetrating into the humblest as well as the highest class of society, has a sphere of operation bounded only by the globe itself, and a practical influence, through their sympathies, upon men’s habits of thought, and consequently upon their morality and their happiness, which is not the less certain and extensive, that its limits do not admit of any precise or distinct determination.

Hence it is a remarkable fact in the history of poetry, that no work essentially immoral, or even exhibiting a mere indifference to moral feeling, has ever maintained a permanent popularity. The low ribaldry which deforms the splendid talents of Aristophanes will always render the perusal of his plays a painful task; the witty licentiousness of the Pucelie is already all but forgotten; and the next generation, while they treasure the better parts of Byron, will assuredly consign to oblivion much of his gloomy reasonings, his contempt for human nature, and his ridicule of generous feelings. The poets who are found to retain their hold over all hearts, and whose influence even appears to extend with the progress of ages, Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, Spenser, Calderon, Tasso, are those who have done their utmost to elevate rather than to depress the spirit and the hopes of men; to make existence brighter about us, and to embody in their strains the principles of faith and hope, of purity and universal charity. For it need hardly be observed, that we are not to condemn a work as immoral on account of a few brief passages, in which the poet, led away by a too lively imagination, has admitted scenes or images of an objectionable kind. Such, indeed, are to be found in Shakspeare, and in the pure and religious poems of Spenser; more rarely also in Tasso; but the general strain of the poem, and the obvious aim of the poet, being to promote the cause of virtue, the few objectionable particulars are lost in the general effect, and cease to be dangerous from their proximity to so much that is calculated to purify and to elevate the mind.

If it be difficult to give an accurate definition of poetry, it is still more difficult to describe that precise combination of mental and moral qualities which are required for its production, so as to distinguish these from the qualities required for perfection in the other imitative arts. The sensibility to natural and moral beauty; the study both of the outward world and of the mind of man; imagination and fancy to furnish the materials; judgment and taste to select and arrange them; these are common to the great poet and the great painter. What determines these energies and capabilities to the one direction more than to the other, and makes one man paint to the bodily eye in côlours, the other to the eye of the mind in words, is that secret undefinable instinct which we call genius, which it is impossible to resolve into any mere result of the force of circumstances, and which, all experience teaches us, is born with the artist, and, like an instinct, directs his after-course. A genius for poetry or for painting is as certainly dependent on an organization mental and physical, with which we come into the world, as a musical ear; no education can give them; no general superiority of intellect will enable a man to turn with equal success to either; nature made him with the elements of a poet or a painter, and what she has so framed, art and education will never alter.

But though it is difficult to enumerate any quality requisite to form a great poet which is not necessary also to form a great painter, it is easy to see, that from the nature of the materials with which they deal, as well as their modes of operation; the one producing its effects by a momentary impression, the other by a continuous exertion; the degree in which the different component qualities of mind are employed in these respective arts is materially different.

Foremost amongst the qualities that constitute the poet is imagination, that creative principle of the mind which forms new conceptions out of previously existing materials; “conceptions not absolutely justifiable by the rides of logic, but quite intelligible to the mind when duly elevated; intelligible through our sympathies or sensibilities, though not sufficiently definite nor strictly coherent to stand the cold survey of our reason.” This is indeed the most essential gift of the poet, “where either he must live or have no life ;” with it, he may triumph over every other defect; without it, no combination of qualities will ever render him a great poet. This is the power which emancipates the poet from the trammels of space and time; carries him back into the spirit of past ages; enables him to create and to endow with coherent attributes beings of a nature different from our own, and yet having for us a real existence, so far as our sympathies are concerned: to conceive and consistently to follow out the thoughts, and words, and passions of imaginary actors, and all this not by a metaphysical analysis of the emotions or passions, nor by a course of induction from actual observation in the world about him, but by a secret consciousness, flashing upon his mind, in a concentrated shape, the result of all philosophy, embodying all, which conception, abstraction, and judgment would have separately furnished. It supersedes the necessity of observation in every special case, because it furnishes him with those primary elements of our nature which give the formula for the solution of all. The value of patient observation and study of life and character, in addition to the suggestions of the imagination, we do not dispute; we shall afterwards see, that within certain limits, and for certain departments of poetry, they are indispensable. But we may be assured, that for those elemental conceptions of character which are unmodified by mere manners, local position, or age; the conception, for instance, of a Lear or a Miranda, a Caliban, an Ariel, or a Hamlet; no observation of human character in the actual world, nor dissection of the component passions and sympathies that make up character, would have sufficed. We have but to look at the range of Shakspeare’s characters to be at once satisfied of this. Pre-eminent amongst these are his characters of women; and yet from what analysis of character, or observation of society, could these· have been drawn? Where could a youth, whose chief companions had been deer-stalkers, actors, or play-writers of no high repute, and to whom female society, at least in its most refined form, must have been unknown, have gleaned the materials which enable him to pourtray, with equal mastery, the fierce overbearing spirit of Lady Macbeth and Constance, the tranquil regal dignity of Hermione and Katharine of Aragon, or the totally dissimilar aspect of female character presented in the passion of Juliet, the purity of Miranda, the simplicity of Ophelia, or the tender submission and wife-like confidence of Imogen and Desdemona? No prototypes existed in the society around him from which these could be drawn. The streets and taverns of London might indeed furnish him with Bardolphs and Pistols; his acquaintance with Lord Southampton, or with the other gallants of the court, might afford the outlines of his Prince Henry or Hotspur; but his female creations are obviously drawn from no other sphere but his own breast. They are the offspring of an imagination “all compact,” not elaborately constructing, but almost unconsciously creating.

The power of imagination is shown in its most imposing form in the conception of character, incident, situation, and scenery,— in the general scope and design of the poem; but [7:18:142]its value and importance as an element of poetry is scarcely less felt in the details, in the manner in which it informs and transforms the whole language of the poem; studding it with imagery, simple or complex, often making a single word act like a spcll, and conjure up a host of magical associations. Its province in this respect is not to be confounded with that lower department of the poetical art which is called diction, and which, when the idea is formed, simply dictates the selection of the word most appropriate to express the precise idea to be conveyed. Imagination supplies the idea itself, or fasciculus of ideas, to be embodied in the word; and in the number, novelty, and judicious selection of associations which can be suggested to the mind within any equal space, lies the chief difference between the work of a great poet and an inferior one, between an original or an imitative mind.

The images suggested by the imagination, we have said, are frequently complex. It seems to fuse many in one, to divide one into many, and to present the mass to the mind in a form which suggests all the particulars of which it is composed. It is certain, too, that many of the images which it suggests, and the effect of which upon the mind is immediately felt by all lovers of poetry to be beautiful, can by no means be justified upon the principles of logic, or their coherence made clear to the understanding. “When Mdton tells us of i darkness visible,’” says a writer on poetry, “we feel that he has uttered a fine paradox; we feel its truth, but cannot prove it. And when in that appalling passage where the poet stands face to face with Night and Chaos in their dark pavilion, ‘ spread wide on the wasteful deep,’ and says that

By them stοαd

Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon, how is it possible to reconcile such expressions to a mere prosaic understanding? Darkness is, strictly speaking, absence of light. How then shall we say that it is visible, when we see only by the aid of light? And with respect to the ‘ name’ of Demogorgon, which staìids by Orcus and Ades, how can such a phrase be justified by the rules of reason? Nevertheless it is as magnificent as words can make it. It is clothed in a dark and spectral grandeur, and presses upon our apprehensions like a mighty dream.”^[1. Edinburgh Review, 1825. ] Take another instance also from Milton, where he speaks of music

At every fall smoothing the raven down of darkness till it smiled.

Here also it is impossible to perceive the mere logical connection of the images; for, allowing darkness to be embodied under the notion of some bird with glossy and raven plumage, it would certainly puzzle any critic to show how musical sounds could smooth such plumage; and yet we should have little hesitation in putting this passage to any one as a test whether he possessed a feeling or sense of poetry r , or whether his mind was entirely of a prosaic character. In these, and a thousand similar instances, particularly in Shakspeare, it is clear that the poetical effect can be explained upon no ordinary principle of reason. The metaphors are what arc called broken; they cannot logically be united, and yet they have a sufficient poetical coherence. How this result is produced we shall only be enabled to explain when the whole laws which govern the faculty of imagination, as yet most imperfectly understood, shall be discovered.

. It is somewhat difficult to establish a plain and practical distinction between fancy and imagination, so far as regards the imagery or ornaments of poetry; though, as we have already said, the higher efforts of conception, and the general design, fall almost entirely, in serious and heroic poetry, under the province of imagination. From Milton’s line, “Sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy’s child,” it would seem that the words fancy and imagination had then been used as having the same meaning; for certainly any one now endeavouring to describe the most remarkable of Shakspeare’s qualities would refer to his imagination rather than his fancy. Yet fancy may perhaps be said to be imagination ata lower point of excitement; not dealing with passions, or creating character; nor pouring out unconsciously, under the influence of strong feeling, images as they arise massed and clustered; but going in search of comparisons and illustrations, and when it invests them with personality, as in metaphors, still adhering much more closely to the logical fitness and sequence which govern similar ornaments in prose. It seems to act like a colder and weaker species of imagination, furnishing the thoughts which “play round the head, but do not touch the heart ;” pleasing the eye and the ear; creating or heightening the idea of the beautiful, much more than of the sublime. It is not careful, like imagination, to make the whole bear on the general design, and heighten the main impression sought to be produced, but rather strives to excite our pleasure, and to bespeak our admiration for the images themselves which it suggests. Its natural field, so far as regards the general design, is in poems like the Rape of the Lock, or the Lutrin, where the object is to give a poetical dress to a subject essentially prosaic, and excluding passion or high imagination. To these it lends an airy machinery, ingenious comparisons, imagery of a lively and pleasing cast in harmony with the level tone of the subject, and thus brings them within the domain of poetry. Some have represented the distinction between the effects of imagination and fancy to consist in this, “that the former altogether changes and remodels the original idea, impregnating it with something extraneous; the latter leaves it undisturbed, but associated with things to which, in some view or other, it bears a resemblance.” But this distinction cannot be admitted; fancy, though in a less degree, does create, or change and remodel ideas; the difference between them must be sought more in the sort of ideas on which they operate, and the purposes to which they apply them, than in the plastic power supposed to be exercised in the one case and not in the other. “Fancy,” says Mr Wordsworth, in a fine passage in his preface, “depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images, trusting that their number, and the felicity with which they are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual value; or she prides herself upon the curious subtilty and the successful elaboration with which she can detect their lurking affinities. If she can win you over to her purpose, and impart to you her feelings, she cares not how mutable and transitory may be her influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power to resume it upon an apt occasion. But the imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion; the soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain its grandeur; but if once felt and acknowledged, by no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished. ' Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, imagination to incite and support the eternal. Yet it is not the less true, that fancy, as she is an active, is also, under her own laws and in her own spirit, a creative faculty. In what manner fancy ambitiously aims at a rivalship with the imagination, and imagination stoops to work with the materials of fancy, might be illustrated from the compositions of all eloquent writers, whether in prose or verse, and chiefly from those of our own country. Scarcely a page of the impassioned parts of Bishop Taylor’s works can be opened that shall not afford examples. Referring the reader to these inestimable volumes, we will content ourselves with placing a conceit, ascribed to Lord [7:18:143] Chesterfield, in contrast with a passage from the Paradise Lost.

The dews of the evening most carefully shun; They are tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.

After the transgression of Adam, Milton, with other appearances of sympathizing nature, thus marks the immediate consequence.

Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops Wept at completion of the mortal sin.

The associating link is the very, same in each instance; dew and rain, not distinguishable from the liquid substance of tears, are employed as indications of sorrow. A flash of surprise is the effect in the former case; a flash of surprise and nothing more; for the nature of things does not sustain the combination. In the latter, the effects of the act, of which there is this immediate consequence and visible sign, are so momentous, that the mind acknowledges the justice and reasonableness of the sympathy in nature so manifested; and the sky weeps drops of water, as if with human eyes, as earth had before trembled from her entrails, and nature given a second groan.” It is evident, that in the parallel passages thus opposed to each other by Wordsworth, the creative or remodelling operation produced by fancy in the former ease, and by imagination in the latter, is the same; in both the sky is endowed with personality and human feeling; it is the propriety of the action attributed to the imaginary being in the one case, and its unreasonableness in the other, which makes the former merely fimciful, the latter highly imaginative.

It will readily be perceived, from what has here been said of the nature of fancy, that when unregulated by a strong judgment, and unwarmed by strong passion, it is one of the most dangerous qualities which a poet can possess. To the predominance of this quality, indeed, to the consciousness of a facility of finding ingenious analogies or subtile distinctions, of conjuring up a multitude of fantastic resemblances, pleasing in themselves, but in no way heightening the leading impression sought to be conveyed, are to be ascribed many of the errors of taste by which modern poetry has been deformed. To this must be ascribed those conceits, from which scarcely a single Italian writer prior to the eighteenth century is free, and which reached their consummation in Marino; to this the similar extravagancies of Gongora, Quevedo, and their followers in Spain; the affected taste introduced by Voiture and Balzac in France, and exploded by the good sense of Molière; and the similar extravagancies of our own metaphysical poets. An excess of imagination cannot lead to bad taste in style; an excess of fancy is but too apt to produce that effect.

Of judgment, which is the regulating and controlling power by which the active and creative faculties of imagination and fancy are guided, checking the too daring flight of the one, and pruning the excesses of the other, it is needless to speak; since it is a quality not more peculiarly requisite in poetry than in oratory, or any of those departments of intellectual exertion which depend noton demonstration, but on the balance of probabilities. In fact, the highest range of imagination has invariably been found to be accompanied by a corresponding depth and comprehensiveness of judgment; or rather, perhaps, it would be more philosophical to say, that judgment is involved and constitutes one of the component parts of high imagination. For the imagination, as is justly remarked by Mr Stewart, is a complex power. “It includes conception or simple apprehension, which enables us to form a notion of those former objects of perception or knowledge, out of which we are to make a selection (in the fine arts); abstraction, which separates the selected materials from the qualities and circumstances which are connected with them in nature; and judgment or taste, which selects the materials, and directs their combination.” It is only in minds where imagination is limited, and where its possessor tries by effort and straining to enlarge it beyond its appointed bounds, that the judgment is generally found defective. Homer and Shakspeare, the most inventive and imaginative of poets, are also the most sagacious, the most practical, the most abounding in wisdom, both of a worldly and of a higher kind.

But, in addition to the natural gifts of sensibility to feel, memory to retain impressions, imagination and fancy to fashion new conceptions, and judgment to blend in harmony all the materials which have been thus accumulated, study is just as essential for the formation of the poet as for the acquisition and practice of the most mechanical art. That study regards both the materials of poetry and the language by which they arc to be communicated in a sensible form to others. Study of men in the different conditions of life, and the habit of observing and systematising these observations; study of external nature, so as to mark the peculiarities which escape common eyes; the accustoming the mind to search for resemblances among things different, and to lay them up in the memory as in a treasury; these are assistances which no poet can overlook, and without which the imaginative faculty is deprived of its due nourishment, and of half its power. For even imagination does not strictly create out of nothing; it must be quickened and set in motion by something external, and demands materials on which it can try its processes of change or recombination. All great poets, therefore, have steadily pursued this course of study of nature, both moral and physical; though, after the habit is once formed, these mental operations are carried on almost unconsciously, and the treasures of poetical observation grow upon their possessor, without his being conscious of any effort in their accumulation. A remarkable instance of the attention paid by great poets to the minutest peculiarities of external nature, and of course equally applicable to the study of mental phenomena, is afforded by the case of Sir Walter Scott. Every one knows the graphic truth as well as the wonderful variety of his descriptions of scenery, which, by their selection of every thing that is characteristic, embody the very spirit of the j l >lacc, and call back to our minds the impression with which we had first viewed it, and which had Aided away and become forgotten. It is evident that in such descriptions Scott trusted little to the imagination, as able to compensate the observation of reality. Mr Morritt mentions, that whilst he was engaged in the composition of Rokeby, he observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil; and on his saying that he need not have taken the trouble, since daisies, violets, and primroses, would have suited his purpose as well as the humble plants he was examining, the poet replied, “that in nature herself no two scenes are exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would, sooner or later, produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth.”

The other department of the poet’s study relates to the use of the medium through which his ideal creations arc to be conveyed to others; in other words, diction, or the choice and arrangement of the words most appropriate to convey the precise shade of meaning, and to convey it divested of all those associations of a low or ludicrous character, which usage sometimes connects with words, and assisted by all the charms of musical sound. All men who seek to command the minds of others through speech must by study learn to [7:18:144]apprehend the power and perfect force, as affecting thought, imagination, and passion, of every word which his fellowmen have used for ages as the vivid image of some conception of the soul. They must acquire a perception of the value of words, at once exact, delicate, and passionate. This careful and fond study of language, however, is peculiarly requisite to the poet, and has been carried to higher perfection by them than by prose writers; “because, in the composition of poetry, the mind, attempered to delight, feels more sensitively the exquisite form into which the material expression of its conception is wrought.” The very shackles imposed by metre and rhyme, though they may occasionally tempt an inferior poet into the use of a word which is not the one most apt to express his conception, unquestionably only operate as a stimulus to the great poet to make himself master of all the resources of words which the language supplies, so as to comply with the necessities of rhyme and musical sound without sacrificing any portion of the substance of his conception. Without this thorough command of the whole armament of language, and the utmost patience and perseverance in its use, we may be assured that no poet has ever succeeded in attaining a general and permanent popularity. Verse cannot leap full armed from the brain of the poet. The steps which lead from the rudeness of the first conception to the elegance of the last, though they cannot be seen, are undoubtedly many. The ideas must be patiently wrought into shape; words weighed and rejected; shades of meaning of the nicest kind discriminated; associations foreseen and guarded against; and an arrangement of words throughout preserved, which, while it differs from that of prose, never allows the inversions which are admitted in poetry to obscure the meaning. The practice of the greatest poets we know to have been in conformity to these rules. We find Virgil dictating a number of verses in the morning, spending the day in revising, correcting, and reducing them, and comparing himself, as Aulus Gellius mentions, to a she-bear licking her misshapen offspring into shape. We see Petrarch returning day after day to his sonnets, to alter some single word, or make some trifling change in the arrangement of a line. The manuscripts of Ariosto, whose style appears the very perfection of ease, and an almost spontaneous emanation, still exist at Ferrara, and show that many of the favourite passages in the Orlando were written eight times over. Scarcely less attention was bestowed upon the stanzas of the Gerusalemme by Tasso. Milton’s study of English speech, and mastery of the artifice of language, as well as the critical care with which he built up “the lofty rhyme,” are well known.

He with difficulty and labour hard Moved on; with difficulty and labour he.

The specimens of Pope’s Iliad given in Johnson’s Life, exhibiting the successive changes which the lines underwent before they assumed that compact and harmonious form in which they appeared before the public, must be in the recollection of every reader. And we see from the letters of Lord Byron, that the same laborious process of polishing was not disdained even by his impetuous mind. It is indeed scarcely too much to say, that no composition of any length, which has attained a permanent popularity, was ever thrown off at a heat; and that the nearer the work approaches to the appearance of spontaneity, the greater has in general been the extent of the labour which has been employed upon it.

Such being the qualities and habits of mind that make the poet, it may be asked what are the common qualities to be found in all poetry which has permanently commanded the admiration of mankind. Milton has endeavoured to condense these into a sentence. Poetry, he says, must be “simple, sensuous, passionate.”

By the first quality, simplicity, which applies both to the matter and the language, he seems to indicate the necessity of dealing in poetry with the simple elements of human nature; keeping the broad highways of feeling, avoiding affectation of sentiment, over-refinement, or morbid peculiarity of any kind. “It distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees, and flowers, and human dwellings, to make his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers, and painfully to make the road on which others are to travel.”^[2. Coleridge’s Literary Remains, vol. ii. ρ. 10. ] And unquestionably it is the fact, that the works of the greatest poets are the simplest, the most level to ordinary apprehension, the most adapted to ordinary sympathies. Homer, in whose works nature is reflected without change, is understood and relished equally by the youth and the man, by nations the most distant from each other both in space and time. Shakspeare, in like manner, in whose works we can detect no subjective influence produced by his own mind, and who seems to range like the universal sun over the provinces of emotion, enlightening all alike, produces the same deep impression on the learned and the unlearned. Both concur in this, that they do not paint the exceptional, but the customary; not the peculiarities, but the common features of humanity; and that they paint these broadly and simply, instead of endeavouring, by a complex apparatus of singular traits and colours, to display their own artistic skill.

The second of the qualities enumerated by Milton is, that poetry must be “sensuous ;” that is, that it shall have that character of sensible reality, which shall prevent its degenerating into mere dreams and abstractions; that it shall be so far connected with the world about us, and with our actual interests and pursuits, as not to appear altogether the creature of another sphere; and this both as to the nature of the subject and the definite nature of the imagery employed upon it. The right understanding and application of this rule would have saved the world from many of those hazy poetical abstractions, or attempts to transmute, political or metaphysical theories into poetry, with which, in the present age in particular, the public has been inundated. It is the neglect of it which renders the metaphysical poetry of the sixteenth century, with all its grandeur and force of thought, so often unreadable; which has made the poetry of Keats, abounding, as it does, in exquisite beauties of conception, a sealed book to the mass of readers; and which, more even than its irreligious tendency, has obstructed the popularity of the poems of Shelley.

The third requisite of poetry is that it be passionate. It is not enough that thought and imagery be sensuous, or objective and definite; the passio vera of humanity, as Coleridge remarks, must animate both. It is by our sympathies that poetry lays its strongest hold on us; and it is by the representation of passion that these must be set in motion. Even the lower and more level departments of poetry must be warmed by it; of the epic, and still more the dramatic, it constitutes the mainspring. Didactic and descriptive poetry would become wearisome were they not enlivened by the occasional introduction of scenes awakening the feelings of love or pity. In lyric poetry, the song constantly exhibits its condensed expression; in fact, so powerful is its influence, that genuine passion will often support a poem which has but slender claims to fancy or imagination. The mere literal and truthful exhibition of [7:18:145]the greater passions of our nature so stirs within us the sense of the sublime or the terrible, so rouses our curiosity and suspense, that for a time we are willing to dispense with the more ethereal colouring which imagination might impart to them. We say, however, for a time only; for a literal picture of human passions, if prolonged through a whole drama, and unrelieved by imagery, or the expression of calmer thought, is felt to be painful and harrowing to the mind. Such is the effect produced by the Newgate Calendar dramas of Lillo, George Barnwell, Arden of Feversham, and the Fatal Curiosity, and by the similar tragedy of Werner, the Twenty-Ninth of February. So great was the effect produced by the scene in Lillo’s play representing the murder of Arden, that the audience, unable to endure the excitement of the representation, rose up with one accord and interrupted it. Appeals to our passions, presented in this bleak and naked reality, have the same painful effect upon the mind which exhibitions of crime and suffering have in real life. To make them produce a pleasing effect in poetry, at least for any length of time, they must be blended with associations of a less vulgar and less agitating kind; and the pain which attends our sympathy must be tempered by the soothing imagery suggested by the imaginative and reflective faculties.

The qualities enumerated by Milton may be considered as fixed and inherent in all good poetry; beyond these it is difficult to point out any which are of permanent and universal necessity. That poetry which seeks to please through our sympathies must shift and vary, both in its themes and in the manner of treating them, with the changes of society, is a truism on which it is needless to enlarge. If the opinions of men change, if their habits and the objects and associations which interest them alter, poetry must adapt itself to this altered state of things. It does so indeed unconsciously; it cannot avoid doing so, for the poet’s own nature has partaken of the change.

It is a more important question, whether the progress of society, the advancement in civilization, and the moral habits and intellectual constitution which accompany it, operate favourably or unfavourably on poetry; in other words, Is there reason to believe that the imaginative faculty in poets, and the sensibilities of their readers, decline with the progress of refinement in the arts; or that the imagination no longer finds the same materials in actual life on which its plastic power can be excited?

The tendency of most of the late inquiries into the question has been towards the opinion of its unfavourable influence. The faculty of imagination is supposed to decline as knowledge becomes more exact; the turn for analysis, which is the characteristic of advancing civilization, and which shows itself in the philosophical character which language assumes, is maintained to be destructive of that individuality and distinctness which is the life of poetry; substituting general abstractions for particulars, vague phrases instead of images, and personified qualities instead of men. In a half-civilized state of society, too, life is a romance, a tissue of adventures, powerfully exciting the feelings of fear, wonder, and enthusiasm. In more refined periods these sources of excitement cease; and, even where they exist, they are veiled by the caution which the fear of ridicule produces, a restraint which in the ruder periods of society is comparatively unknown. Hence both the imagination of the poet and the sensibilities of the reader of poetry are chilled. « Poetry,” says one of the ablest exponents of this unfavourable view of the effects of civilization on the arts, “produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body. And as the magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in upon its exhibitions—as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite, and the shades of probability more and more distinct—the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which it calls up grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction.”

Yet these observations, though true to some extent, must be received also with some qualification. If language loses something in picturesqueness, it becomes far more pliant, far better adapted to convey the exact idea intended; if phrases which originally conveyed images have by long use ceased to be metaphorical, we see that genius is constantly creating and giving currency to new combinations. Knowledge and learning and mechanical improvements, if they tend to repress enthusiastic feeling, at least supply poetry with a host of illustrations unknown to earlier periods; but, above all, it may be doubted whether the enthusiastic and imaginative faculties within us can ever be materially affected by the changes of society, however their outward manifestations may be repressed. Whilst men feel that they are connected with eternity, mysteriously surrounded by influences which they fee! and acknowledge though they cannot account for them; whilst love still holds a place in the heart, and carries the spirit of romance into the barest realities of existence; whilst men have a country to honour and defend; whilst they can still be animated to enthusiastic concert in the cause of humanity; whilst the strange accidents by which even our decorous and conventional course of life is at times broken, still present to them a thousand scenes of joy or calamity; there seems little reason to apprehend that the imaginative faculty can ever be so impaired from want of external nutriment or inward vigour, but that a truly great poet will always find the means of speaking to the hearts and sympathies of men, in different language it may be, but with undiminished power.

Still less reason is there for the apprehension, that the materials for description and illustration which external nature offers to the poet are likely to be in time exhausted, or even materially encroached upon. Certainly the first and the more obvious of its features are caught by the first labourers in the field of poetry, with a truth and liveliness which no subsequent efforts are likely to surpass; and if poetical imitation were, like literal landscape or portrait painting, a mere transcript of the scene before us, there might be reason to think that all the more striking aspects and points of view would, in the course of time, come to be exhausted, and the poet driven either to mere repetition in a feebler form, or to seek for novelty by endeavouring to turn to account the materials which his predecessors had thrown aside as least fit for their purposes. But when it is recollected how infinite are the varieties and combinations of which the objects of moral and material nature are susceptible, how largely, too, a creative and changing power is exercised in poetical imitation; and in how many different lights, independently of this process of imaginative change, the objects around us are placed by natural differences of associations in the person who contemplates them; it may be safely assumed that the materials of poetry are inexhaustible.

That poetry must have existed from the very earliest periods is undoubted. As the expression in language, of that feeling of excitement and elevation produced either by moral or material grandeur or beauty, it had its scat and origin in human nature itself, and in its simplest form must necessarily have existed as soon as man felt the desire of recording his impressions, or communicating them to others. In its first shape it may have been destitute either of rhythm or metre; although so close is the connection between that state of the imagination which gives birth to poetical conceptions, and a tendency to assist the effect of these by certain intonations of the voice approaching to musical sounds, that it is far more probable that even from the first [7:18:146]something of measure was imparted to it, probably without effort or consciousness on the part of the reciter. At any •rate, the power of measure as an assistant to memory, and as furnishing a species of gratification to the ear. apart from the mere effect of the ideas upon the mind, could not fail to be soon perceived and acted upon. At first, in fact, poetry and music seem to have been constantly associated; for the study of music, as something separate from the accom-pahiment of words, is one which arises only at a later period; and in all the poetical compositions which have descended to us, the elements of versification, or division of lines into certain measures, are discernible.

The poetry of the Hebrews is the oldest in the world. It stands apart from all the rest, in solitary grandeur, - like a pillar of fire in the poetical wilderness. The poetry of Greece, for instance, only begins to exist centuries after the noblest efforts of the Hebrew muse had been produced and committed to writing. Even the oldest poetry of the Arabians, whose language is a kindred one to the Hebrew, is of far more recent date than the Jewish Scriptures, in fact not much older than the time of Mahommed. The Hebrew poetry, as it has come down to us, seems limited in its field, though within that field it has attained a mastery never excelled. Almost all its compositions are lyrical, and chiefly in the highest department of the lyric, resembling, though in a less regular and artful form, the ode of the classical poetry. Its characteristics appear to be unequalled majesty of thought and expression, a fervour and flow which, more than in any other poetry in existence, suggest the idea of an inspiration or divine afflatus, dictating, through the poet as a mere organ, the sublimest ideas in words of corresponding weight and grandeur; a profusion of imagery and illustration, which, though it at first appears excessive and overpowering to the critic of modern times, and colder climes, is seen upon further study to be in the Closest harmony with the Hebrew character, and that of all the oriental nations, and is remarkable for the absence of any thing farfetched or elaborate; a rapid desultory movement from one train of thought or illustration to another, without formally supplying the links in the chain of association which have led to the new topic,—as if the poet relied upon a corresponding excitement in his readers or hearers to supply that elevation and reach of poetical vision necessary for tracing the chain of ideas from first to last. It is certain, however, that to the Hebrews themselves there was much less of abruptness and want of connection in their lyrics than at first sight appears to us; and that slight hints were sufficient to awaken trains of associations to which, from our altered circumstances and character of mind, we have now no clue; and this observation, in fact, applies equally to the Hebrew and to great part of the classical poetry of Greece and Rome.

When we look to the Hebrew character and poetry, and to the local situation and manners of the country, we perceive a combination of circumstances highly favourable to the growth and development of that department of poetry in which alone they can be said to have attained distinguished eminence. All the elements out of which a great national lyric poetry is formed existed amongst the Hebrews, both as regarded the impulses of the mind and the external influences by which they were surrounded and daily acted on. They had been selected as God’s peculiar people from among the nations; they held as it were a commission from-heaven, giving them authority over the world; they looked upon themselves as the race from which its Saviour was to spring. They had triumphed, by the divine aid, over the kings, and princes, and Pharaohs of the earth; they had the recollection of all their strange wanderings, their miraculous deliverances, their acquisition of the promised land, and their law given amidst audible thunders and visible smoke from Mount Sinai, in the presence of assembled myriads. They had a religion which, excluding the worship of the Deity under visible symbols, only made the image of the Deity more deeply and impressively worshipped within the temple of the heart and the imagination: while the connection of religion with all the affairs of life; the constant rites and ceremonies and festivals of rejoicing or humiliation; the presence of the Deity, kept before their thoughts by the ark, which was supposed to be his peculiar seat, and the sacredness of which had been more than nnce guarded or avenged by prodigies; prevented that religion from becoming a mere abstraction, and gave to their conceptions of the Deity a warmth and life , peculiarly suited to the poetry of devotion, as blending the ideas of the visible and the spiritual, without any admission of those palpable, material, and degrading conceptions which mingle with and deform, to our associations, the mythological or religious poetry of Grecian polytheism. No commercial pursuits tended to excite among the earlier Hebrews the prosaic love of gain. They were shepherds, husbandmen, or warriors, deriving subsistence from the soil, and attached to it by a train of recollections. Frequent public ceremonies, festivals, jubilees, gave occasion for the assemblage of the people in large masses, for a common purpose; the occasion of all others most likely to call forth, by a common sympathy, the enthusiasm which stimulates the imagination into poetical activity. Add to these a climate bright and cheerful, but admitting also of every variation and interchange of serenity or tempest; a country, the external aspect of which presented the strongest contrasts of barrenness and luxuriance; fertile plains, with mountain ranges of the most bleak and desolate grandeur; gardens like those of Damascus, with dreary lakes like the Dead Sea, whose stagnant waters still spoke of the fall of the cities of the plain, or wildernesses haunted by the lion, the rhinoceros, and the serpent; and it would indeed be matter of surprise if the Hebrew sacred poetry were not characterized by a remarkable feeling of national pride, of sublimity, simplicity, and natural pathos in its sentiment, and by a peculiar freshness, truth, and boldness in its pictures of nature, or illustrations derived from external scenery. The parched plains of Judaea, the rocky top of Sinai, the towers of Damascus, and the gardens of Lebanon and Carmel, supply them with figures or allusions which have an unspeakable charm of picturesqueness and beauty. The climate is vividly brought before us in the allusions to the wellsprings that water the desert, and to the shadow of the great rock in a weary land. We see the simple character of their life in their pastoral images, so constantly derived from the tending of flocks and herds; imagery so congenial to their minds, that it is employed by the Author of our faith in some of the most touching passages of the New Testament. Such is the character of those books of the Hebrew Scriptures which are on all hands admitted to be poetical, though we know too little of the laws of Hebrew prosody to be able to say whether they are written in verse, though a species of rhythm, and apparent equality in the divisions of portions of the sentences, appear to indicate that they are. Such are the Book of Psalms; one of which (the ninetieth) is even ascribed to Moses, whilst several others were the production of predecessors or contemporaries of David. It is certain, however, that those ascribed to him are the finest and the most affecting of the whole, though perhaps not the most magnificent in point of stateliness of diction and imagery. “Nor is it in tragic so much as in joyous expression,” says Mr Campbell, “that I conceive the power of his genius to consist. Its most inspired aspect appears to present itself when he looks abroad on the universe with the eye of a poet and with the breast of a glad and grateful worshipper. When he looks up to the starry firmament, his soul assimilates to the splendour and serenity which he [7:18:147]contemplates. His lofty but bland spirit of devotion peculiarly reigns in the eighth and in the nineteenth psalms. But, above all, it expands itself in the 1Q4th into a minute and richly diversified picture of the creation. Verse after verse in that psalm leads on the mind through the various objects of nature, as through a mighty landscape; and the atmosphere of the scene is coloured, not with a dim or mystic, but with a warm and clear light of religious feeling. He spreads his sympathies over the face of the world, and rejoices in the power and goodness of its protecting Deity. The impressions of that exquisite ode dilate the heart with a pleasure too instinctive and simple to be described.”^[3. Campbell’s. Lectures on Poetry, i. ] Such also are the Song of Solomon, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Lamentations, and the Book of Job, with large portions of the prophetic books, and occasional passages even in the narrative books, such as the Song of Moses and 'Miriam, Jacob’s dying prophecies to his sons, the triumphal chant of Deborah, Balak’s involuntary blessing on the people whom he came to curse, and, above all, the exquisitely pathetic and beautiful lamentatioh of David over Saul and Jonathan. Amongst the Hebrew prophets, viewing their writings apart from their divine inspiration, and merely in the light of poetical compositions, the highest rank is universally ascribed to Isaiah; and that on account of the union of excellencies which his sacred poetry exhibits. Deeply pathetic in some portions, as in those where he paints the destruction which is about to fall upon Judah; awfully sublime in others, as where he describes the descent of the Assyrian king into the regions of hell, while all the dead monarchs of the earth rise up to greet him with reproaches; he rises with equal ease to themes of rapturous exultation, or spreads out in minute portraiture all the tranquil and soothing images of a coming millennium. “Joel,” says Mr Campbell, “may be deemed to surpass him in continuity,‘and both Joel and Habakkuk are at moments more sublime. But their compositions are much shorter than his, and give us not the same conception of copious and unwearied inspiration. Isaiah’s genius goes farther on an even wing, and burns longer with an unwavering fire. When he has merely to relate, his language has the utmost plainness; and his expositions are remarkably clear, considering the nature of oracular poetry. He unites the same simplicity with his rich and high visionary scenes, which are neither meagre like Jeremiah’s, nor ambitiously overwrought and complex like Ezekiel’s. A deliberate air, a divine selfpossession, turns the very scorn and wrath of his spirit into movements of grace and beauty.”

Jeremiah and Ezekiel belong to the declining period of Hebrew literature. They had fallen upon the evil days of their country, and the influence which its misfortunes and degradation produced on the mind, is peculiarly visible in the melancholy strains of Jeremiah. “His genius seems to bend, his voice to falter, under the burden of prophecy; and though sometimes pleasingly affecting, he generally prolongs the accents of grief to monotony, and seldom avoids tautology except where he abridges the works of other prophets.” Ezekiel is the last great prophetic poet of the Hebrew line; and opinions have been divided as to the poetical rank to which he is entitled. Dr Lowth thinks that he is not excelled in sublimity even by Isaiah himself; Michaelis, on the contrary, that he displays more luxuriance in amplifying and decorating his subject than is consistent with true poetical fervour. Mr Campbell adopts the view of Michaelis, but adds, that the fancy of Ezekiel is daring and ingenious. Ingenious hardly appears to be the term applicable to the imagination of Ezekiel, which revels with peculiar pleasure in visions of a mystical, and, it ’ must be admitted, somewhat confused sublimity. Some passages, however, are most powerfully impressive, such as the vision of the four cherubim^ in the first chapter, and the resurrection of the dry bones in the thirty-seventh, when there was “a noise and a shaking, and the bones came together, bone unto his bone ;” and the prophet calls unto the wind, “Come from the four winds, 0 breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live; and they stood up on their feet, an exceeding great army.”

But whilst the Hebrew poetry equals, and indeed far excels, that of any other nation in the sacred lyric, it is singularly defective in the other departments. The Song of Solomon, laying aside its spiritual meaning, maybe admitted to be a fine specimen of the pastoral: but of dramatic and narrative poetry the Hebrews have left no specimens; for, though the book of Job has to a certain extent a dramatic form, it has clearly nothing of the essential qualities of the drama. This has been ascribed mainly to the theocratic nature of the Jewish constitution, in which the Levi tes or priesthood formed the sole and literary aristocracy; thus devoting poetry exclusively to religious themes. But, considering the ample field which the Jewish national religious history afforded, it is not easy to sec why, if the genius of the people had inclined toward narrative or dramatic poetry, the Exodus, the wanderings in the desert, the wars carried on under the judges, and the many other striking events which gave interest to their annals, should not have been embodied in verse, as they were in prose, in the narrative books of the Old Testament.

But, though the poetry of the Hebrews is the first in the order of time, it cannot properly be regarded as the fountain-head of that literature, the course and connection of which we trace in an unbroken series of great works down to the present time.

The sacred poetry of the Hebrews, no doubt, impressed upon the literature of Christianity some strong and remarkable features; but it was from the fountain of classical literature that the genius of modern Europe first drew its inspiration. It is therefore to Greece that we must turn, as the head of that great family of literature with which we feel ourselves connected by relationship of thought and association.

On turning from the poetry of the Hebrews to that of Greece, we are immediately struck with one distinctive feature, which, as applicable to the whole of its poetry, we may notice before adverting to the different departments into which it is subdivided, viz. the more palpable, material, and distinct character of all its conceptions and imagery. This immaterial, vague, and spiritual character of the Hebrew poetry, dwelling more on emotions of the mind than on actions, and on the invisible rather than the outward and visible, is unquestionably to be ascribed in a great measure to the predominance, in the national mind, of a pure and elevating religious creed. On the other hand, the Grecian mind, formed under the influence of a mythology which was in fact a mere deification of the material world, and which certainly exercised no strong influence save on the fancy, banished those themes and trains of thought which led beyond the visible diurnal sphere, and, concentrating its attention upon the present, gave to all its imagery a distinctness of outline, a simplicity and pellucid clearness in the thought, which, if less suited than the Hebrew to the excitement of the evidences of the sublime, was certainly in a. corresponding degree favourable to the creation of beauty. The Hebrew poetry, therefore, is contemplative and subjective; the Grecian plastic and objective.

- In an outline like the present, of the progress of poetry, it is needless to dwell upon the subject of the anti-homeric [7:18:148]poets of Greece. That there were poets before Homer, we know; and this is really the extent of what is known on the subject. That the art of poetry had been cultivated to a considerable extent, that its principles had been subjected to reflection and experiment, when Homer lived, is as clear as internal evidence in any case can make it..

Poetry improves only as painting and sculpture rise to perfection. “In sculpture,” says Herder, “what a track must it have travelled over in passing from the figures on the chest of Cypselus to the decorations of the Propyleia and the Minerva of Phidias, or from the sculptures of Daedalus to the Olympic Jupiter. A like track was travelled by poetry in advancing from the rude lays in honour of gods and chiefs to the Homeric Epos.” We know, indeed, that many of the minstrels before Homer had sung théogonies and cosmogonies, the adventures of Titans and heroes, of Hercules, Theseus, and the Argonauts; and in all probability the legends of the siege of Troy, and the return of the chiefs engaged in that enterprise, had formed the subject of many a ballad or rhapsody, ere a Homer arose to give them unity, proportion, and poetic life. All these have faded and been forgotten, for the tablet of human memory is narrow, and, to give room for the last and best, the older and ruder inscriptions must be erazed. Not one of these, accordingly, has descended to us in any authentic form; whilst the spuriousness of most of the Orphic poetry is unquestionable. Whether even an Orpheus ever existed, was doubted by Aristotle; and Herodotus distinctly states his belief, that the poets given out as older than Homer were in fact of more recent date.

We do not enter into the details of the question whether the works which bear the name of Homer were the productions of one man, and written in their present form at the period commonly ascribed to them, namely, nine hundred years before Christ, or whether they were originally the work of many rhapsodists, in portions separate and distinct, and afterwards woven together in a collected form about the time of Solon and Pisistratus. The question is, in fact, of less importance in reference to the history of poetry than might at first sight appear. For whatever view may be adopted, it is clear that the spirit, the tone, and the manners which are described in the separate lays, supposed to have been ultimately incorporated in one, are those of the earlier and not of the later period, and that the Iliad paints the Grecian mind and character as it appeared three or four hundred years before the time of Solon, and that from draughts made at the time. If so, the only way in which the adoption of the modern theory of Wolff affects the question is, that it deprives Homer of the merit of one grand general design, consistently followed out. It is certain, however, that whatever difficulties may attend the supposition of the Iliad and Odyssey being written by one man, in their present form, and at the early date ascribed to them, and preserved in the absence of writing by mere oral tradition, the difficulties on the other side are infinitely greater. To suppose that a set of scattered lays, composed by a number of unconnected minstrels, should ever have been made to cohere so smoothly and compactly, evincing such perfect unity of plot and purpose; that they should have been confined to so small a portion of the Trojan legendary history, and have given such prominence to a single Thessalian hero; seems a supposition far more startling than any that attends the belief that the Iliad is the work of a single author. “For inspiration is a solitary creative spirit; and it is not to knots and groups, or accidental fabricators, that she has ever intrusted those great conceptions in poetry or painting, or the fine arts, that have commanded the permanent homage of mankind.” Many smaller additions, by other hands, in the same spirit and style, may have been afterwards superinduced upon the original work of Homer. (See the article Homes.)

The two great poems of Homer are the first specimens of The Epic, or narrative poem. It is, in fact, from the Iliad in particular that our conceptions of an epic poem have been derived, and its canons deduced. What Homer has done has been consecrated as establishing inviolable rules to be observed by his successors. The epic is, upon the whole, the noblest form of poetry; that which demands the highest and most sustained power of imagination, combined with the simplest and purest taste. The power of tragedy is greater for the moment; for its presentations, assisted by action and visible form, are more vivid; but the epic, possessing a wider compass, and painting only by words to the eye of the mind, has a more diversified, enduring, and tranquil operation. Rapidity, strength of passion, vehement and animated dialogue, are the essential requisites of tragedy; a calm, sustained, progressive, and sober majesty the characteristic of the epic. “Of dramatic pieces,” says Herder, “we remember sentences; the characters move before our eyes, we feel their emotions with them. But this emotion being stronger, is also briefer; it passes away. The epopee, with its more quiet working, with its proportions too vast for any stage to compass, fills the soul, and there abides.” The other points noticed by Aristotle, “revolutions of fortune, recognitions, characters, passions,” are common to both, as well as to fictitious composition in prose. Every romance written on any high principle is, in fact, a prose epic; the epopee in verse merely adds to the other sources of interest the charm of poetical diction, and of those elaborate ornaments of figures and similes, which, though stately and appropriate in verse, only produce a bombastic and ridiculous effect in the prose of Fenelon, or still more in that of Macpherson.

An epic, then, is the poetical development, in narrative, of some great and interesting event, or series of events, sufficiently separate from what goes before or follows, to possess the character of a whole; having, therefore, a clear and distinct beginning, middle, and end; an action simple at first, leading into a complication of plot, and terminating in a natural and soothing solution. These are its essentials; amongst its accidental features are the employment of supernatural agency as a medium either of heightening emotion or of conducting the plot; the introduction of episodes, of formal addresses, invocations, and similes; matters which have no essential connection with epic poetry, and the propriety of the introduction of which varies with the theme, the age, and the national associations of the poet.

To the confusion of these accidental qualities, many of which are certainly quite unsuited to the taste of modern times, with those essential features which must have an equal interest for all time, must be ascribed the numerous failures which in modern times have thrown a certain discredit and air of ridicule upon the epic poem; as well as the belief that appears to prevail, that the time for epic poetry is past. Unquestionably any epic now written which deals with fabulous mythologies or exploded superstitions, and employs in the nineteenth century the long elaborate speeches, the minutely touched similes, the formal enumeration of ships, and muster-rolls of regiments, which suited the primitive times of Homer, when description was new, will probably share the fate of Leonidas or the Epigoniad. But in the hands of a poet selecting a theme of sufficient natural and human interest, remote enough to allow play for the imagination, yet near enough to make us understand and sympathise with his actors, and treating it, not in a slavish spirit of imagination, but with the vigour and independence of original thought, we are persuaded that the epic would be found to have lost none of its power. It seems to be an entirely mistaken opinion, that the epic is only the production of an early and comparatively simple state of society, and therefore unlikely to harmonize with the more complex nature and critical taste of more advanced civilization. On the contrary, the Jerusalem of Tasso, the Paradise Lost of [7:18:149]Milton, and the Lusiad of Camaens, the only three modern epics which deserve the name, are the productions of what may be termed the golden age in point of taste in each country, and of individuals uniting to poetical inspiration all the stores which the widest reading and most sedulous cultivation of learning could supply.

The great powers of Homer are distinguished from all modem epics, by their wonderful air of truth, their broad clear portraiture of character, infinitely varied, and yet not antithetically contrasted; their perfect absence of all affectation, false sentiment, or exaggeration, either in character or sentiment; their calm and impartial spirit; their serenity, cheerfulness, and good sense. Such a union is indeed not to be expected in a modern state of society; after poetical description has already traced all the leading outlines both of moral and material nature, and when men, insensibly and unavoidably subjecting the influences from things without to a process of intellectual chemistry from within, and thus, connecting them with peculiar associations, cease to have either the power or the inclination of simply reflecting back on their verses, as in a mirror, the impressions of nature as they fall upon the mind. Neither, although the power of delineation existed, can it ever be expected that such materials for broad, simple, and effective painting can be found in modern times, when differences of character are veiled, if not in a great measure obliterated, by community of education and habits, or are converted into mere humours or peculiarities, to which the shades of distinction are too minute for any grand poetical effect.

Even the greatest of our modem epic poets, in painting the manners and the moral habitudes to which chivalry gave birth, laboured under the disadvantages of pourtraying feelings which, springing, as they had done, out of a visionary and unreal, because exaggerated, sentiment, had a tendency to run into caricature, and to give a monotonous and hyperbolical cast to their delineations of human character. The beings painted by Homer, who himself lived upon the outskirts of the heroic times of Greece, were in their features the men whom he saw around him; beings natural, open, and unsophisticated, both in their good and bad qualities: the manners simple, primitive, and homely, yet not without a touch of grave courtesy and refinement; the scenery which forms the foreground or background of his human groups as yet undepicted, the incidents through which they pass unhackneyed; all nature was before him where to choose: while the language which was to be employed as the medium of his art, neither debased by vulgar associations, nor diluted from its original freshness and strength by metaphysical refinements; which diminish its picturesqueness, in proportion as they render it more complex and philosophical, affected the mind with all the distinctness of sounds and colours, and stamped upon it an impression fresh and immediate, as from the signet of nature.

The power of invention displayed by Homer in his two great poems, in the conception of character, can only be fully appreciated when we recollect, that the germ or outline of almost every character which has since figured in epic poetry is to be found in the Iliad. Now, though the wonderful variety of his incidents, his battles, sieges, and storms, his nocturnal adventures, his combats of gods and men, and his scenes of enchantment, may have been in a considerable degree derived from his predecessors, and, in fact, the hereditary and traditional properties of the ballad minstrels of Greece, it is impossible to conceive that he could have derived much aid from this source in giving individuality and life to character. And yet, with the exception of characters under the influence of the passion of love, such as Dido, Annida, and Erminia, scarcely any substantial addition has been made to the picture gallery of Homer by later epic poets. His characters, in fact, have been like stereotypes, from which new impressions are constantly reproduced. Achilles, with his union of ferocity and gentleness, generosity and vindictive feeling, has been the model of all our mixed characters of passion since, and reappears in Turnus and Rinaldo; just as the kingly Agamemnon, with his grave dignity, has formed the archetype of those which represent the ascendency of reflection, and the moral power of sustained and tranquil grandeur, as in the Godfrey of Tasso’s poem.

The characters of the Iliad are naturally the more varied, because its subject was a great public event, and the actors were the congregated princes and heroes of Greece and Asia; the Odyssey is the poem of domestic life, the tale of the fortunes of a single hero, to whom all the other personages are purposely placed in subordination, but whose character, by this isolation, gains a degree of distinctness and natural truth absolutely unequalled in fiction, save in some of the creations of Shakspeare. The remarks of Mr Campbell on the characters of the Iliad are so just and beautiful, that we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting them.

“Achilles, in the centre, is of the order of spirits that electrify and command mankind. His alarming and sensitive being is the soul of the Iliad, and his very absence and repose are the causes of its disastrous action. He is unquestionably ferocious, but his quarrel is just; he is wronged, high minded, hating falsehood like the gates of hell, young, beautiful, and predestined to fall. Casual glimpses of his manners are also given, that interestingly soften our conception of him. He is the only hero of the Iliad who amuses himself with music and poetry. The deputies of the army find him in his tent playing on his lyre, and chanting heroic songs; and, though he knows their hateful errand, he receives them with a calm and manly benignity. Horace does him injustice when he calls him a disclaimer of laws, and inexorable; for he melts into tears at the prostrate gray hairs of Priam, the father of the slayer of his friend, though he had lately withstood all the eloquence of Nestor.

“It shows the security of Homer in his inspiration to have introduced such an opponent to Achilles as Hector. But when he leads us to Troy, he makes us Trojans in our affections, and almost seems to become so himself. Prodigal in sympathy with the events and agents which he conjures up, his imagination as tenderly conceives the lamentations of Hecuba, and the heart-sick swoon of Andromache, as it makes itself impetuously congenial with the vengeance of Achilles. Like nature, he is fruitful in creating characters, and, like her, impartial in distributing and intrusting virtues to contending parties. Conscious that Achilles could shine by his own light, he fears not to show us his image through tears for the fate of Hector. In delineating Hector by the eulogies of his weeping country and friends, the climax is exquisitely perfected by Helen. All others who had bewailed him, she says, were bound to him by reciprocal tics; but hers was the grief of gratitude for the undeserved and gratuitous kindness of his mighty heart. He had interposed when others had reproached her; he had soothed her when her tears flowed at their reproaches.

“Aeneas creates a less ardent, though still respectable interest; and it is increased by a hint, which is thrown out with an air of minute historical probability, that Priam was jealous of his greatness, and that his virtues had been partially thrown into the shade. What expression in every figure of this mighty tablet! What diversity even between men incompetent to great actions; as between the abject coward and vulgar braggart Thersites, and the gay good-natured Paris, whose spirit, though sunk in luxury, still shows some traces of his noble breed! The stout heart and arm of Ajax stand him in lieu of all piety, craft, or sensibility; whilst Sarpedon, bleeding in warfare not his own, spends his last generous breath in exhorting the brave to [7:18:150]rally the battle. Homer is above all artificial antithesis in the painting of character; but in describing natures remotely different, he could not avoid exhibiting contrasts; and that which is visible between Achilles and Ulysses is as perfect as heroic nature can afford.

“The youthful Diomed is, among the Greeks, next to Achilles, the apparent favourite of the poet: all spirit and lustre, his valour burns like ζ the unwearied fire that plays on his shield and crest.’ Like Achilles, he is insulted by Agamemnon, who charges him with cowardice on the eve of battle; but he is wise as well as warlike, and it is not till his actions have belied the imputation, that he retaliates upon his commander. When the Greeks have been worsted, and when Agamemnon proposes abandoning the siege, Diomed, the youngest of all the chiefs, rises in the council, and gives him a dignified rebuke. Agamemnon himself is not without the virtues of fraternal affection, and willingness to listen to able counsellors. He has also his day of distinction in the field. But his importance altogether is more royal than personal, and his faults are made conspicuous by his supremacy. Alternately presumptuous and despondent, he is the readiest to tax others with deficient courage, and the first himself to despair under public reverses. He is also unmerciful in victory. The cry for quarter is addressed to him in vain, and he makes two of the most atrocious refusals to spare that occur in the Iliad. It has been remarked, that Homer speaks as a friend to royal government; but still he describes it as too limited, or rather as too undefined, to be despotic; and the chiefs in the councils of the Iliad present us with a sort of Greek picture of Gothic feudalism. And if he shows respect for monarchy, he makes his kings no monopolists of virtue. In poetical justice, he seems to have thought it sufficient to give Agamemnon the diadem, and a few good qualities, as his share of importance in the poem, leaving brighter heroic endowments to chiefs subordinate in political power.

“Amidst these forms which the Iliad exhibits in the bloom of strength of heroism, the aged characters are no less happily distinguished. Nestor looks back on a life of greatness and wisdom :—he has no rival in venerable years; his powers have reached the last ripeness of experience, but they have also something of the mellow tint that precedes decay. He dwells on his own exploits with an egotism and fulness that could only be endured in the most ancient of men. Phoenix, the friend of Achilles, on the other hand, is also old, but his youth had been embittered by misery and vindictive passions; and when he comes to exhort the hero against excessive resentment, he confesses his early errors in a tone very different from the self-complacency of Nestor.

“Priam is neither very wise nor energetic; but his heart is warm with natural affections, and his woes and years sustain our reverence and solicitude. When the wail of the Trojans bursts from their walls, at the sight of Hector dragged in triumph by his conqueror, when the frantic father implores his friends to let him go forth and implore the pity of the destroyer, the struggle of his people to detain him, and the voice of his instinctive agony, surpass almost everything in the pathos of poetry, and affect us more like an event passing before our eyes, than a scene of fictitious calamity. Never was the contrast of weakness and strength more fearful, than when he throws himself at the feet of Achilles, whilst his feeble perspicacity makes us tremble at every moment, lest he should light up the inflammable temper of Achilles, fluctuating between wrath and compassion. Yet, hallowed by paternal sorrow, age and weakness prevail. The old man accomplishes his point, and the terrific vietor condescends to the delicacy of even veiling Hector’s corpse from his view.”

The Odyssey, with certain common resemblances to the Riad, is marked also by striking differences; so great, indeed, as to afford room for believing, not that it was the work of several hands, but that it may be the work of a different poet from the author of the Iliad. None of the gods and goddesses who play a part both in the Iliad and Odyssey appear the same in the latter poem as in the former. Jupiter, the representative of force or power, and the arbiter of all things in the Iliad, resigns the conduct of the hero to Minerva, the personification of wisdom. Menelaus, Helen, and Ulysses himself, leave a different impression on the mind. Manners and morals have changed. There is a perceptible advance in knowledge and the mechanical arts. There seems a decline in physical strength. The chivalrous spirit of the Iliad is exchanged for a more prudential and calculating one. Voyaging and wandering come in place of warfare. The qualities most valued are no longer the wild strength and energy of Achilles, but the self-possession, energy, forecast, invention, and eloquence of Ulysses. The agency of Magic, in room of a purely divine agency, a power of which we have no hint in the Iliad, finds a place. Wonders and prodigies are scattered with a profusion unknown to the Iliad. Many portions of the Odyssey have an air of resemblance to the Arabian Nights; and Sinbad would seem to have borrowed more than one of his adventures from Ulysses. It is not even difficult to perceive that the vocabulary and syntax of the language have in some measure altered. Each poem seems, as Herder remarks, to have its peculiar atmosphere, its sky, its panorama of objects in the upper, the middle, and the nether world.

Ulysses, the hero of the latter poem, is a conception more in harmony with ancient than modem views of heroism. Our ideas on the subject have been so strongly influenced by those notions of the point of honour introduced by chivalry, that we do not easily sympathize with a hero who, though not deficient in bravery, is always more ready to employ craft than courage, and only appeals to arms when artifice is found to be ineffectual. The character embor dies, as Mr Coleridge observes, the idea of an accomplished man of the world, after the manner of ancient paganism; and it is therefore with some effort that we, whose ideal of such a personage is so different, interest ourselves in his fate. Yet he does make his way at last into our affections. His character grows upon us like the gradual influence of good sense. Human traits peep forth under the guise of impassive constancy and caution. His home-sick longings for Ithaca, his abandonment to the power of love under the influence of Circe, remind us of our common humanity. He bears his trials so firmly, he steers through difficulties with such tact and skill, and meets danger, when it must be met, with such self-reliance and courage, that he gradually acquires our admiration; and when we become more familiar with the kindly and warm affections which, after all, burn on in his breast beneath the crust of stoicism, he at last engages our sympathy and our love.

The poems of Homer are at once the first and the last great specimens of heroic sθng in Grecian poetry; for it were out of place, in an outline like this, to allude to the middle school of the epic, while even the attempt to revive heroic poetry in the Alexandrian period only proved that its life and soul was extinct. Even in the Odyssey, as already mentioned, we perceive a decline of the enthusiastic and chivalrous spirit, a tendency towards the commercial and the peaceful. Imagination is gradually “fading into the light of common day.” This tendency appears, however, far more remarkable in the works of Homer’s immediate successor, Hesiod. We say successor, because, although some authorities represent him as older than Homer, and Herodotus speaks of him as Homer’s contemporary, the balance of evidence is clearly in favour of the superior antiquity of Homer. The precise date of his appearance, [7:18:151]however, cannot be fixed with more precision than as having been between eight and nine hundred years before Christ. The works which bear his name consist of the Wecks and Days, the Theogony, and the Shield of Hercules, of which the latter is generally regarded as spurious. Looking to the subjects and character of his poems, which are of a domestic and peaceful character; to his style, which, though highly natural and simple, is, in the main, flat, level, and uninspired by high imagination; we should almost imagine that a full century must have elapsed between the Odyssey and the Wecks and Days. The time, adventures, battles, moving accidents by flood and field, and expeditions undertaken to recover some fair runaway “that enchants the world,” seem to be for ever gone. In their stead we have an account how labour fell to the lot of man, the story of Pandora, our gradual degeneracy from the gold to the iron age, precepts of agriculture and commerce, moral and religious admonitions, which have much the air of trite proverbs and commonplaces of what deserves no better name than cunning and worldly wisdom; every thing, in short, indicates the triumph of the spirit of peace over that of war. The Theogony is in a somew hat more ambitious style; and, as a catalogue or muster-roll of the Grecian divinities, with a regular deduction of their genealogies, is curious. Unfortunately, however, its finest passage, the battle of the gods and Titans, a piece of genuine vigour and sublimity, appears so different from the style of Hesiod, that it would rather seem interpolated at a later time by some scholar, whose work has in this case very far surpassed his master’s. On the whole, Quinctilian has criticised Hesiod with judgment and fairness. “Raro assurgit Hesiodus, magnaque pars ejus in nominibus est occupata; tamen utiles circa praecepta sententiae lenitasque verborum et compositionis probabilis, daturque ei palma in illo medio genere dicendi.”

The Homeric hymns, a series of compositions in praise of the gods, and probably of a date a little later than the age of Hesiod, seem to bridge over the passage from the epic and heroic poetry to the lyrical. The steps of the transition may even be in some measure traced, in the gradual ascendency acquired by the musical accompaniment which had from the first been employed in the recitation of the epic, but to which a greater prominence was given in the hymns, thus leading on to the decided influence of the lyre and pipe, and consequent accommodation both of the form and character of the poetry to that lyric mould in which it was thenceforward to be cast. Terpander himself composed the music for these Homeric rhapsodies; and Hesiod is said to have been denied admittance to the Pythian games because he could not accompany his verses on the harp. These hymns, strange, quaint, some almost comic; others, like that to Hermes (the finest of alD, full of a wild and dancing gaiety; almost all treating the inhabitants of Olympus with a free and easy familiarity; abounding in rapid transitions, invocations, and reflections or sentiments of the writer; prepared the way for the more regular lyric, as it appeared in the strains of Archilochus (about 700 B. c.), to whom is assigned the distinction of being the father of the Grecian lyric.

The perfection of the Greek lyric had grown out of the intimate connection of poetry with music, fusing the finest results of both into a whole, which, charming the senses and the soul at once, hurried away the listener with an irresistible sweep of enthusiasm. Every thing in the circumstances of Greece contributed to its rapid development find unfailing effect. A spirit of gaiety and social enjoyment was the national characteristic, heightened by the influence of a delightful climate, and by a religion whose airy and fantastic character interposed no gloomy reflection to check the enjoyment of the present. The public and family festivals, sacrifices, games, and poetical con tests, assembling multitudes together, exciting the spirit of rivalry, and gratifying the poet as it were with a foretaste of his poetical immortality, the high honours and distinctions everywhere paid to song, rapidly advanced the art to perfection. It is probable, tbat if the whole mass of the Greek lyric poetry could now be recovered, not only would Horace, Catullus, and the Latin lyric writers, be unquestionably shorn of many of their finest passages, but, in all probability, we should be presented with the noblest and most varied collection that the world has ever produced. For if the light luxurious Bacchanalian spirit of the time be imaged in the graceful trifling of Anacreon’s festive songs, we know how the deeper and more gloomy sentiments of a genuine passion were embodied in the burning lines of Sappho; the ardour of military enthusiasm in him who sang his verses to the Spartan fife, Tyrtaeus; the inspiring themes of patriotism in “Alcaeus, fancy drest, singing the sword in myrtles dressed the touching tenderness of maternal affection in the Danae of Simonides, weeping over her child in her frail and sea-beaten prison; and, above all, the loftiest strains of religious fervour, the praises of demigods and heroes, all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of human existence, in the odes of the greatest master of the Grecian lyre, Pindar. But, unfortunately, of the works of the nine who are enumerated by the ancients as forming the constellation of the lyric writers, and embracing the period from the death of Hesiod down to the great era of the Persian war, viz. Pindar, Bacchylides, Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus, Simonides, Ibycus, Alcaeus, and Aleman, some have completely perished, and of others only the most trifling fragments remain. Anacreon and Pindar are the only two of which we possess any considerable specimens.

Judging from the few fragments we possess of Sappho, the loss of her works is particularly to be deplored; for she appears to have possessed not merely that wild fire and hurry of passion which predominate in her celebrated ode (with which every one is familiar in the version of Phillips), but a tenderness of heart, a power of presenting imagery in a line or a word, not surpassed by any of the ancient writers, and justly entitling her to the lofty title of the Tenth Muse, bestowed upon her by antiquity. How exquisite, for instance, is the fragment preserved by Demetrius Phalereus, ’ Ertrtζs tτaντa φ'.ζtif φtζS ∣ { o<ι>sv, φsζtis αίγα φtetis μaτsζι ¶raiìa.

Thus expanded, yet scarcely improved, by Lord Byron :— 0 Hesperus, thou bringest all good things Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parent’s brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o’erlaboured steer;

Whate’er of peace about our hearthstone clings, Whate’er our household gods protect of dear, Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;

Thou bringst the child too to the mother’s breast.

Pindar unquestionably occupied the highest place among the Greek lyrists; and though it is certain that we are in possession of only a small part of his works, for he appears to have written on every variety of theme, enough remains to satisfy us that the judgment of antiquity, which raised him to the lyric throne, was well founded. Forty-five triumphal lays, in honour of the victors in the public games, have descended to us, and the character and peculiar merits of these have been described with such eloquence, and at the same time critical justice, by Sir Daniel Sandford, in his able sketch of the rise and progress of literature, that we quote the passage in preference to any remarks of our own.

“The most careless reader of these odes must be struck by the excessive admiration of wealth, magnificence, and every species of greatness, to which we have alluded as a characteristic of Pindar’s nfind. Splendour was the passion of his soul; splendour of achievement, splendour of renown, [7:18:152]splendour of station and outward circumstances. His very pride seems to have suggested to him that nothing but splendour was worthy of his muse. His genius, to use a figure of his own, was the eagle of Jove, that would not be severed from the sceptre and the god. These aristocratic predilections, this enthusiastic attachment to munificent monarchs and chiefs of ancient fame, were in perfect unison with the whole tenor of his destiny; born as he was in the midst of the Pythian festival, living surrounded by shows of solemn pomp, and dying, as he had lived, in the full blaze of public ceremony, in the centre of a theatre, and while rapt in those emotions of rejoicing sympathy which such scenes were sure to awaken in his bosom. To those, however, who may deem apology requisite for the indulgence of so stately a temper, it may be urged in behalf of Pindar, that, as in the case of many remarkable poets, the abstract feeling of veneration was predominant in his mental constitution, and that it was called forth not merely by rank and opulence among mankind, but even more powerfully by the contemplation of the divine attributes. Hence that glow of piety which shines so brightly in his odes, sometimes breaking out in expressions of the deepest awe, or in sublime pictures of deity, and sometimes assuming an aspect of moral beauty, adding force and lustre to the lessons of wisdom. The latter modification of religious feeling has given birth to some of the noblest passages in the poetry of Pindar. He was well aware that emotion does not exclude sentiment; that the ethics of the heart are not less sound than those of the brain; and that nature is often hurried, in moments of excitement, into the innermost shrines of truth. But he knew likewise, that the philosophy of such moments is prompt and peremptory; oracular, not syllogistic; and this knowledge has secured him from frequently offending against the genuine character of lyric song by lengthened trains of moral reflection.”

When the lyric poetry of Greece had reached its perfection in Pindar, its drama rose into shape and grandeur in the tragedies of Aeschylus. But for the history of the progress and decline of the Greek drama, tragic and comic, the reader is referred to the article Drama in this work.

Little remains to be said of the declining portion of Greek poetry. General corruption, introduced by luxury, and the evil principles of the sophists; loss of liberty, when all the powers of Greece bad yielded to the sway of Alexander; the introduction of a tumid oriental taste into eloquence and composition in general; such are the features which mark the period from the rise of Alexander the Great to the extinction of the poetical literature of Greece. After the death of Alexander, indeed, a strong effort was made by the Ptolemies to render Alexandria the rival of Athens, and to assemble about their court poets, orators, and men of science. In the latter point only their efforts were successful. Science continued to flourish, and long after Greece had ceased to produce any great works in the fine arts, we find geometrical invention carried to a height by Euclid, whilst the wonderworking science of Archimedes struck the Romans at the siege of Syracuse with terror and astonishment. But eloquence remained, as before, hollow and pompous, whilst poetry was in a great measure wasted in the vain attempt to give life and interest to the abstractions of science. This was the period of the learned or didactic poetry. Mythology, astronomy, botany, were the favourite subjects to which the art of the poet was devoted. One attempt, however, to révive the epic taste is visible in the elegant Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius. He cannot indeed be regarded as an epic poet, for he wants fire and originality; but he is a graceful compiler of traditions, the effect of which he heightens by occasional touches of tenderness.

The most interesting, however, and by far the most original, of the works of the decline of Greek poetry, are the Idylls of Theocritus (270 b. c.). One is at first surprised to find the appearance of the bucolic or pastoral poetry, so late in comparison with the heroic, the lyrical, and the dramatic. As it seems to paint a primitive period of human nature, we are led to think that it would be one of the first forms in which poetry would appear. The truth is, however, that it has generally made its appearance, and has always been most popular, in ages of great social refinement, when excess of luxury in the life of cities drives the mind back upon the supposed simplicity of rural life and its occupations. Such was the case with the Greek Idylls of Theocritus, with the Bucolics of Virgil; with the pastoral dramas of Tasso, Guarini, and Bonarelli; and with the pastorals of Pope and Phillips. They are all the growth of a period of great literary refinement. Frederick Schlegel observes justly, however, that there is an essential error in isolating pastoral poetry, as is generally done, and viewing the country life abstracted from its due situation in that picture of the world and of human life which it is the province of poetry to unfold. “Let us reflect for a moment on those passages in the heroic poems of antiquity, or in the chivalric romances of the moderns, which afford us glimpses of the simplicity and repose of rural manners. Their simplicity appears still more innocent, and their repose still more peaceful, from the situation in which they arc placed in the midst of the guilty tumult of wars, and the fierce passions of heroes. Here everything appears in its true and natural connexion, and the poetry is as varied as the world and the men which it professes to represent.” It is certain that this treatment of the rural life as a department of life, by narrowing within the most confined limits the materials of the poet, is the cause of that monotony which is generally found to pervade pastoral poetry. Nothing, in fact, becomes more wearisome than the repetition of Arcadian descriptions of the golden age,

Lactis uberes Cantare rivos atque truncis Lapsa cavis iterare mella.

But this fault is more prominent amongst the modern, particularly the Italian pastoral writings, than in Theocritus, who has in general painted his shepherds and peasants with a natural and manly simplicity, approaching even, as it seems to modern ideas, to coarseness. His Idylls, as indeed the name implies, are little poetical pictures or representations in miniature, sometimes of mythological subjects, at other times of matters of common life, but almost always amatory in their purpose and termination. With Theocritus may be classed, though far inferior to him in vigour, the “showy Bion and the delicate Moschus,” the last names of any note which precede that period of exhaustion, when, the days of high imagination and great works being over, those of mere cleverness and neatness of execution, of slender trifles, epigrams, and anthologies, commenced.

But as the genius of one nation, yielding to the force of circumstances, declines, nature seems to provide a principle of compensation in the development of that of another. The course of literature and poetry appears to resemble an arctic summer, in which the sun scarcely dips in one quarter of the horizon before he re-appears in another. While the creative energies of Greece either sink into barrenness or expand into a rank and unwholesome luxuriance, as her morals are corrupted, and her liberties impaired and at last extinguished, we perceive in the Italian peninsula the rise of a national character and a literature, destined, alike in arts and arms, in polity or in literature, to give laws to the world.

Yet Italy, free and independent as she was, and animated by a consciousness of national pride and growing power, exhibits during the first five centuries of her history (73t> B. c. to 253 B. c.) a mere blank, so far as poetry is concerned. That she may have possessed legendary ballads founded on those various mythic or semi-historical traditions which [7:18:153] were afterwards interwoven by Livy into his history of Rome, is not improbable; but of the nature of these we know nothing, of their existence at all we have no certain traces; and nothing can be more fanciful than the extent to which Niebuhr, Schlegel, and other German writers have carried their conjectures on this subject.

In fact, we know nothing of .Roman poetry prior to the introduction of the Greek language and literature, through the conquest of Tarentum (272 b. c.) and Magna Graecia; soon after which the rude attempts of a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, to translate the Odyssey of Homer into Latin (240 B. c.), first gave the victors some idea of the poetical treasures of that nation, to which, though victors in the field of warfare, the Romans felt their inferiority in the more peaceful domain of literature. His preferring the wilder and more homely of Homer’s poems to his more imposing, elaborate, and dignified performance, only showed that he rightly apprehended the tendencies of an infant taste. Children as they were in poetry, the power of the marvellous had attractions for the Romans, which that of simple yet heroic truth would probably not have possessed. The efforts of Andronicus to diffuse a taste for Greek literature did not stop here; for he was the translator also of several specimens both of the tragic and the comic drama of Greece.

He was succeeded by a Roman poet of original though coarse and unequal genius, Ennius (239 b. c.). Yet, with strong originality of mind, he was a worshipper of Greek literature; and his influence on his successors is probably owing in a higher degree to what he transplanted from the soil of Greece, than what he reared from the independent stores of his mind. He attempted by turns, epic, tragic, satiric, epigrammatic, didactic, and even acrostic poetry. He versified the Roman Historical Chronicles, a poem of which few specimens survive, but these calculated to excite much regret that a work, executed with so much force and feeling in parts, should have been irrecoverably consigned to oblivion. His vigorous and forcible style, with all its rudeness, conceits, and ridiculous jingles, appears in its better parts to have possessed great charms for the best judges of diction at an after period; for we find that Virgil, Lucretius, and Ovid, and particularly the first, have availed themselves most liberally, not only of the ideas, but of the precise expressions, and frequently whole lines, of Ennius;^[4. Dunlop, History of Roman Literature, vol. i. p. 21. ] l while Horace, who seems to have had a warm feeling of the poetical fire that lay under the rude crust of the verses of Ennius, after citing two of his lines, says that the “disjecta membra poetae would appear visible,” however their arrangement might be transposed; a result which, he fairly admits, would not be the case with regard either to the satirical works of Lucilius or his own.

Neither in Ennius, however, nor in his dramatic successors, Plautus (died 184 b. c.) or Terence (born 195, died 159 B. c.), do we meet with much that is truly national. In all we are in fact perusing Greek compositions in Roman forms; for the plays of Plautus and Terence present to us, not the aspect of Roman life, but the state of Greek society, pretty much as it had appeared in the days of Menander. In the former we perceive more vigour, more variety, broader humour, but at the same time more coarseness; in the latter a limited invention, and characters reducing themselves to a few limited classes, generally an over-indulgent father, a profligate son, a rapacious mistress, and a knavish slave; to which Plautus is fond of adding some Bobadil or parasite, by way of relief. Yet in Terence’s case we perceive the traces of genius, notwithstanding the close imitation by which he is fettered. His characters have a truthful air, his dialogue is always free from affectation, and sometimes touching and tender in the highest degree. In fact, a few of his best passages in this style are models of apparently artless and yet consummately artful and beautiful expression.

Two other individuals of distinguished genius precede what is called the Augustan period of Roman poetry, Lucretius and Catullus; the one the most distinguished of the Roman didactic poets, the other unequalled in the short and tender lyric. Lucretius contended with an absolutely unmanageable subject; one which, from its unimaginative character, from the dreary details, psychological, meteorological, geological, which it necessitated, the inherent feeling of discomfort which it leaves behind, and the irreligious character of the opinions which it involves, necessarily interposed the most formidable difficulties in the way of the poet, which it is no disgrace even to the most distinguished genius, and such Lucretius possessed, not to have entirely overcome. It is, in fact, the highest proof of the ability and genuine inspiration of Lucretius, that he has infused a poetical vitality even into the dry bones of that philosophical mummy which he was attempting to animate; that he has treated with a feeling of poetical enthusiasm the coldest and most heartless of all creeds, the Epicurean; so that the very strains which he has employed in combating the belief of the immortality of the soul, bear upon their face the stamp of immortality. “In inspiration and in sublimity,” says Frederick Schlegel, “he is the first of Roman poets; as a painter and worshipper of nature, he is the first of all the poets of antiquity whose writings have come down to us.”

In Catullus the Epicurean theory, which wears a majestic aspect in Lucretius, appears in a less dignified but more probable form. Carpe diem is the motto which might be inscribed over all his compositions; yet wfith this enjoyment of the present mingles not absolutely a melancholy, but a pensive feeling, which gives a peculiar interest to them all. For compositions of a higher mood and more extended plan, Catullus apparently had as little ability as inclination; his taste was Grecian, and formed in the school of Alexandria; slight performances, epigrams, elegies, little lyric effusions expressive of individual feelings, like the charming lines to Sirmio, or the lament for the sparrow, and polished with the most exquisite felicity of diction, were the subjects to which his talents were devoted. There is, in fact, every reason to believe that his more ambitious performances, such as the Epithalamium of Pclens and Thetis, and the Atys, were simply editions in a Latin form of Greek originals.

The poets hitherto mentioned belong to the period of the republic; in their successors, the poets of the Augustan period, we perceive a considerable change both of spirit and expression. Under the calm but firm sway of Augustus, which had reduced all the contending parties under one powerful dominion, and conferred upon the country the blessings of peace, the art of poetry was peculiarly cultivated and patronized. And it is at this period that the Roman poetry first displays in its fullest extent that feature which Frederick Schlegel considers its truly national and original trait, namely, that exaltation of Rome and of the Roman character; that feeling of the unrivalled energies, the rapid growth and ever-increasing dominion of their country, which formed, to the imagination of the poet at least, an ample compensation for the loss of that liberty which, since the commencement of the troubles of the Gracchi, or the contests of Sylla and Marius, had been little better than a political phantom, or a party watchword with no real meaning.

The great representatives of this Augustan period of poetry are Virgil and Horace. No two poets could be more dissimilar in the direction of their tastes, and yet it would be difficult to say to whom the palm of greater genius [7:18:154] ought justly to be assigned. Even in his Pastorals, though an early work, the leading qualities of Virgil’s mind, his exquisite taste and fine sensibility, are apparent, though they can hardly be considered in any other light than as graceful adaptations, and, it may be safely added, improvements , of the subjects and manner of Theocritus. In these he was painting from a painting; he was copying a Greek landscape in the colouring of the Latin tongue. But in his Georgies he drew from his own observation of Italian nature; and, bringing the native excellencies and qualities of his mind to bear upon imagery and events and associations which nature and experience had dictated, presenting us with delicious landscapes varied by all the natural occupations of the Italian agricultural life, gilded by sunshine, clouded by storm, or darkened and disturbed by tempests; combining these in the most dexterous manner with striking allusions to well-known events and catastrophes of Roman history, such as the prodigies which portend the death of Caesar, or with old mythological traditions; and making the driest details of husbandry, such as the grafting of trees or the breeding of bees, prolific of imagery or of fable consecrated by early associations; the result is one of the most original and at the same time delightful poems which exists.

The Aeneid was a great, but, it must be admitted, unsuccessful attempt to do that for Rome and the Roman people which Homer had done for Greece, namely, to give the Romans a great national poem. No one felt this failure more than Virgil. His reluctance to give publicity to the Aeneid is well known. He could only be prevailed upon to read to Augustus the first, second, fourth, and sixth books. Several causes may be obviously assigned for its want of success. 1s<, Not only did Virgil, from the intense admiration he felt for Homer, copy in many respects his characters and design; but he endeavoured to combine the distinct and almost incompatible characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey*, the grand and warlike character of the former with the wandering and adventurous character of the latter poem. 2c?, Although the notion of grafting the adventures of Aeneas upon the origin of the Roman nation, was in itself a happy one; and the mythological traditions connected with it might have been brought to bear with much effect upon the subject; Virgil committed the great error from which Tasso has also suffered, of making an epic poem a mere instrument of political flattery, by identifying the character of his hero with that of Augustus. By depriving himself of the open and untrammelled field which the traditional character of Aeneas presented, and making that character a mere portrait, en beau, of the cold-blooded, calculating, and critical emperor, he lost at once all hold over the sympathies of the reader in the fortunes of his hero, a cardinal point in all poems that pretend to the character of epic. 3¢7, Nay, he even enlisted those sympathies against him; for, as Voltaire, who is seldom wrong in what may be called the logic of poetry, observes, he represents him as a mere adventurer, who in the first place is guilty of the most shameless want of feeling in regard to Dido, whose sole object is to acquire a settlement in Italy; who, in breaking off the match of Turnus with Lavinia, is instigated, not by passion, but by policy; and who would in all probability have most willingly surrendered the Latian princess to his brave and generous though cruel rival, if he would have resigned the kingdom of Old Latinus to a Trojan stranger, and taken Lavinia, like Cordelia, without a dower.

Only one substantial addition has been made by Virgil to the characters of Homer, and for that character he may have received some hints from the Ariadne of Catullus; but it must be admitted to be one of the most deeply interesting in poetic fiction, we mean that of Dido. The great night-picture of the sack of Troy, and the episode of Dido, are indeed the finest things in the Aeneid. In the character of the Carthaginian princess, we perceive the infinite advance which the delineation of the passion of love has made since the time of Homer. Virgil has begun to comprehend that feeling, with the world of emotions to which it gives birth. And if he has not painted it with all that purity and depth which was imparted to it by Christianity, he has exhibited its leading traits with a warmth and sensibility which make all the other classical delineations of passion both cold and lifeless beside that of Dido.

Horace exhibits the singular specimen of a poet borrowing half his thoughts from the lyric writers of Greece, and making his odes a mosaic formed from the gems of other countries as well as his own, and yet imparting to the combination a high degree of unity, and a decided originality of character. Calm wisdom, shrewd penetrating observation of life, a sober enthusiasm, and most refined taste, are the qualities which most distinguish him, imparting to all his compositions extreme point, terseness, and occasionally, in themes of a higher cast, particularly those connected with the elder worthies of Rome, or the lofty position she then occupied in the eye of the world, a stately and solemn grandeur. This admirable balance of mind which distinguishes Horace, and informs all his writings with such pregnant good sense, renders him a peculiar favourite in a country like our own, whose national character is marked by not a few of those features that distinguished the mind of the poet. Hence his odes are more read and quoted, particularly by men of business and practical sagacity, than the works of any of the classic poets.

But the merits of Horace, though most conspicuous·as a lyric poet, are great also as a satirist. Lucilius had indeed made the first approach to the regular form of Roman satire; but his rude and harsh effusions can no more be compared to the polished and graceful productions of Horace, than the rugged verses of Donne can be compared with the satires and epistles of Pope. In Horace all follies and lighter vices of the day (for he seemed to think satire scarcely a fit weapon when directed against the darker vices) are touched on in a strain of the most urbane ridicule, which insinuates reproof. As compared with those either of Lucilius who preceded, or of Persius and Juvenal who succeeded him, the tone of the Horatian satire is light and playful. It has been correctly observed, that these satires filled up for Roman literature exactly the department which in our times is occupied by the stage. For as the plays of Plautus and Terence truly represented Greek and not Roman manners, it was in the light form of satire that all those humorous follies and oddities of Roman society, which properly fall within the range of the comic, were displayed and exposed.

The elegiac poets of this period, Tibullus and Propertius, wrote with purity and good taste; the former with more of tenderness, the latter with more of force and mental vigour. But in the extravagant luxuriance and frequent conceits of Ovid, we perceive the commencement of that decline of poetry, which, relieved only by the manly vigour of Juvenal’s satires, goes on in rapidly-increasing progression to the extinction of the Roman empire. For the amatory and elegiac poems of Ovid little can be said; they want heart and passion as much as delicacy or propriety of sentiment. But the praise of a teeming fancy cannot be denied to him; he is a mine from which thoughts and expressions may be dug without end; and his Metamorphoses, as a graceful exposition of the finest mythological tales of antiquity, will always retain their interest for modern times.

We pass over the so-called tragedies of Seneca, the works of a mere school rhetorician; and the satires of Persius, obscure and rugged, though not without a masculine energy. But the name of Juvenal must be mentioned as the last great poetical name that illustrates this period of decline.
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In the finer portions of his satires, for it must be admitted they contain a good deal that is level and prosaic enough, he displays the highest talents for this species of poetry; the strength of his language, the fire of his invective, correspond with the gigantic character of the vices which he exposes. But a certain air of exaggeration mingles with and alloys the effect of his censures; we are led to think of the doubtful character of his own life, and to question the title of the moralist to raise the scourge which he applies with such severity to others. A tinge, in short, of that rhetorical and formal character which his mind appears to have contracted in the schools of declamation attaches to his poetry, and leaves an impression of hollowness and insincerity upon the mind.

Lucan’s Pharsalia, it must be recollected, was a comparatively boyish effort; but it seems plain, from the character of his mind, that he wanted the highest of the poetical faculties, imagination. He uttered bold and striking thoughts occasionally in the happiest words. No poems afford finer specimens of single lines for quotation than Lucan. But the whole is destitute of poetical warmth; it blazes only with a phosphoric fire. Quinctilian has, in fact, hit with admirable tact the character of Lucan’s mind in the remark, “Si dicam quod sentio, oratoribus magis quam poetis annumerandus.”

We shall not here touch upon the remaining writers who feebly kept alive the vestal fire of poetry up to the period of the overthrow of the Roman empire of the west; Statius, Claudian, or Ausonius. Even the introduction of Christianity, much as it did towards improving morality, not only among its votaries, but amongst the Pagan nations themselves, could not re-animate to new life the worn-out and enervated frame of literature. That could only be effected by sweeping away entirely the old landmarks, making a new heaven and a new earth, creating new associations in all the ideas of men, giving them new hopes, aspirations, and pursuits, and thus restoring that elastic principle of moral and mental vigour, of faith and enthusiastic feeling, out of which all high poetry must spring. From the rude but warlike and uncorrupted nations of the North, was to come that influence which was to give a new aspect to society; at first, like the descent of a deluge, sweeping the remains of cultivation before it, but ultimately depositing and carrying deep into the bosom of the soil the elements of a reviving and healthy fertility.

From the fall of the Roman empire of the West, about the close of the fifth century after Christianity, to the appearance of the first great poet of modern Europe, Dante, an interval of seven dreary centuries elapses, a period characterized in popular language by the epithet of the dark ages. During this period the chaos resulting from the overthrow of the old Pagan constitution in religion, government, laws, and social institutions, was gradually settling into shape; the new religion was incorporating itself with and imparting a new form to social life; new laws superseding the subtile and complex jurisprudence of Rome, new languages growing out of its ruins. During the greater part of the period to which we have alluded, literature, in any high sense of the word, did not exist; but the materials of new literatures were accumulating, and the spirit which was to give them breath and vitality, when language should be sufficiently settled for the purpose, was developing itself, though manifesting itself in other fields and departments than that of poetry. When poetry re-appeared in the thirteenth century, the influence of the intermediate changes which the human mind had undergone became visible in certain marked traits, separating by thq broadest distinctive lines the character of the modern European from the ancient classical poetry. A few of these, as applicable to all the modern literatures of Europe, though with differences in degree, may be indicated before proceeding to any notice of these separate literatures.

1. The first and most important is the influence of the Christian religion on the productions of the imagination.

The Pagan religions were mere religions of the fancy; they were nothing but the poetry of humanity. They dealt only with the palpable and the material; and by the combination of the finest features of the actual, they produced an ideal which each moulded to his own fancy. The conceptions of the infinite and the immaterial they avoided. The solemn and the mournful found no place in their thoughts, or, if such ideas did intrude, they were made use of as arguments for present enjoyment. Let us eat and drink, seems the moral of paganism; let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

From this materialism of the ancient mythology, and its purely imaginative character, the results were, Isí, great clearness in all its conceptions and its expressions, that clearness which is imparted by the absence of all that is not palpable to sense; 2d , a light and cheerful tone, the natural product of that mental indifference, and absence of serious reflection, which the disbelief, or as least doubt of immortality, would produce; 3rf, the feeling of beauty as the object aimed at and accomplished, and the vital principle of all the classical creations.

Very different were the character and the influence of Christianity. This was a revelation, not a creation of the fancy. It spoke to the heart, to the hopes and fears of men, not merely to their imaginations. The outlines of the Christian theology were communicated in a fixed and settled form, with which fancy could not deal at will, or mould them in accordance with its notions of beauty. It excluded at once that plastic power which had formed the excellence of Greek art and literature, and banished mere beauty as the aim of the poet, or the principle of modern inspiration.

To the clearness, the sunny lightness of touch, the cheerful levity of tone, which distinguish the classic poetry, it was equally unfavourable. It made the mind familiar with the ideas of infinity and eternity; it accustomed it to abstract conceptions beyond the pale of sense, or the scope of distinct expression; it forced upon its consideration the immaterial and the invisible, as constantly as the Pagan theology had confined the attention of its votaries to the visible and the actual. The Pagan clearness of portraiture, and smiling lightness of tone, were incompatible with the description of regions and states of being, sights and sounds, which eye had not seen, nor ear heard, and which it had not entered into the mind of man to conceive. The Christian poet, before whom, instead of a natural and visible Olympus and Acheron, there stretched out in dim but awful vision the conception of heaven and hell, encompassed by an eternity on this side and on that,—a conception impressed by the sense of moral responsibility, and of eternal punishment or happiness, and animated by a principle of faith based upon things not seen,—could not but carry into the literature which was the expression of his thoughts, and hopes, and fears, some shadow of that solemnity and mystery with which human life was now surrounded. He left this narrow spot of earth, already in the possession of his predecessors, to open up the new and undiscovered country of the abstract and the invisible; and the principle of poetical inspiration which they sought in beauty, he found in grandeur aηAsublimity. Hence earnestness and profundity are the means of effect in the literature of Christianity; and elevation rather than beauty may be said to be the aim of the higher poetry of the moderns.

2. The superstitions which grew out of the corruptions of Christianity, and which assumed a systematic form after the crusades had opened to Europe a communication with the East; the belief in spectres, fairies, witchcrafts, and the direct[7:18:156] interposition of evil spirits in the affairs of men; gave a different character to the modern literature of Europe. It is true, that in the Canidia of Horace, the Erichtho of Lucan, the Thessalian scenes of enchantment in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and occasionally in other passages of the classical writers, we have allusions to popular superstitions somewhat analogous to our own; but it is equally plain that these are not matters of serious belief, but of poetical embellishment. They could not, in fact, cohere with any consistency with the framework of the antique materialism, though they might be combined with a religion which assumed the existence of powers unknown to human sense, and of a principle of evil, which, with limited powers, was permitted to oppose the principle of good. These conceptions of immaterial beings distinct from men, but influencing their actions, assumed a reality and appearance of probability, which soon rendered the belief in their existence one of strong practical influence upon society, and of course upon literature. Hence the gloomy and superstitious character impressed upon many of the earlier productions of all nations; and which, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, manifested itself in such fearful action in the atrocities of the trials and executions for witchcraft.

3. Whilst the Pagan mythology affected only the imagination, Christianity appealed to the conscience, and was calculated to operate practically upon conduct. We see, accordingly, in the history of the middle ages, that religion was not, as it becomes in after ages, a mere profession, often assumed from habit, but a principle of faith, of conviction, and of serious action. We see, through this invisible but powerful agency, a spiritual throne established at Rome, to which, weak and insignificant as it appeared in physical and economical resources, the most powerful monarchs in Europe were content to bow with implicit obedience. During the middle ages, the possession of the keys of St Peter was found a more effectual instrument of supremacy than the temporal -sword. We perceive the clergy looked upon as a superior race; their persons and possessions considered as sacred; the rudest and boldest nobles of the time trembling at the thought of their anathemas, courting absolution at their hands^-⅛χiciting. dispensations, founding monasteries and cathedrals, undertaking penances, pilgrimages, and crusades; and we see them often, in the midst of the fierce <⅜arecr of warfare, as if struck by some sudden inward but irresistible impression, throwing down the sword, exchanging the helmet for the cowl, and wearing out, as is told of our own Guy of Warwick, the evening of a stormy life in the peaceful cell of the hermit. There was in all this much of error, much of impure feeling and doubtful character; but there was also much of truth, much of earnestness,;' a⅜d hence faith and devotion are as visibly stamped upon the literature of the middle ages,*SsAhey unquestionably were influential upon its life. z . ¾∙½v

4. Apart from the influence of religion, although not unconnected with it, there were other social changes which had strongly affected the course of feeling and opinion, and could not fail to render themselves visible in literature as soon as it began to assume a regular form. The most important of these was the institution of chivalry, growing out of, and affording an imperfect remedy for, the defects and evils of feudalism; an attempt, in fact, to create a species of police or constabulary, founded upon those principles of generosity and honour which were frequently found associated in the human mind with cruelty or licentiousness, during those stormy days of feudal dominion.

It was not, however, on its warlike and serious side that chivalry exhibited any very novel features; for, as far as regarded merely its spirit of adventure, numerous parallels might be found in ancient story to the exploits of its votaries. The feats of Theseus with the Minotaur, the story of Perseus’s deliverance of Andromeda, the Argonautic expedition of Jason in search of the golden fleece, the more celebrated expedition against Troy, all closely resemble the exploits which chivalry prescribed to the members of its order. The true point of view in which chivalry gave a new direction to the. opinions of the age, and a new impulse to literature, was in the altered position which it gave to women. It is certain, that before chivalry was known, nay, before Christianity was introduced, a peculiar reverence for women had been shown by the Gothic nations. Tacitus, in his treatise on the manners of the Germans, adverts to this as one of their characteristic features. “Inesse iis etiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant.” The introduction of Christianity ratified and consecrated this feeling of respect. It made woman the equal and companion, not the slave, of man. But chivalry went a step farther. It reversed the relations in which the sexes had stood during the classical times, and exalted, in theory at least, the softer sex above the stronger and the more warlike. As the best means of arming the helpless against the powerful, it surrounded them with an angelic atmosphere of sacredness, and converted love into adoration, respect into religion. Here, too, there was something affected, but much more that was genuine. This feeling, exaggerated as it seems to us, did unquestionably influence in a high degree the opinions of the age, their tastes, their modes of expression. Its effect upon modern literature has been most remarkable. It has rendered the principle of romantic love almost the mainspring of modern poetry, and of imaginative composition in general. It forms almost the sole subject of the poems of the Troubadours, the minstrels of the south of France, Spain, and Italy, with whose compositions the history of modern poetry properly ..commences. Dante, the father of the Italian language‘and poetry, finds the source of the inspiration which dictates his sonnets and canzoni, and at last The Diviιιa Commedia itself, in. this species of romantic adoration for a deceased mistress. Petrarch’s poetry, and his deification of Laura, are one and the same thing. The lyric poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of Italy seem to have scarcely conceived that any other course than that of imitating Dante and Petrarch in this chivalrous Platonism was open to them. The principle of romantic love is carried by Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto to an excess which communicates to it an air of the ludicrous; a reproach, however, from which it is again redeemed by the serious and enthusiastic Jerusalem of Tasso. When in modem times the attempt was made to revive tragedy, it proved totally unsuccessful, until this principle was admitted into the drama to give it warmth and life. Of that species of composition which in its proper sense is peculiar to the moderns, viz. the novel and romance, it forms, as we all knçw, the moving power. In short, it influences, <mofe or less, every department in which the imagination has exerted itself with success since the revival of literature.

5. Another point in the social institutions of the time, which affects in a considerable degree the spirit of the literature of the European nations in the outset, is the relation of feudal vassalage, the degraded condition of the mass of the people, and the subdivision of the state into so many separate baronies, within each of which its feudal lord exercised supreme authority. This subdivision annihilates that inspiration of patriotism, or attachment to country or state, which is very visible in the Roman literature, and more faintly in the Greek, and introduces in its stead the principle of loyalty or implicit obedience to the individual superior to whom fortune had given the right of disposing of the destinies of his vassal. Submission to authority under all circumstances, without remonstrance, is represented as the highest of virtues; and a violation of this principle cannot be palliated by any exhibition of courage or self-devotion. A fine illustration of this principle in the moral code [7:18:157] of the feudal times occurs in Schiller’s fine ballad of the Fight with the Dragon, founded on a story given as authentic by Vertot, in his History of the Knights of Malta. Rhodes was laid waste by a monstrous serpent, which has already destroyed not a few of the knights of St John, who had been rash enough to engage in cojnbat with it. The grand-master, accordingly, had strictly prohibited any of the order from engaging in the apparently hopeless attempt. One young knight, unable to witness with patience the spectacle of the misery and distress daily caused by the ravages of the monster, ventured to despise the prohibition, and, by dint of art and valour combined, delivers the island from its persecutor. He was conducted in triumph to the hall, where the knights were met in council. The grandmaster received him in gloomy silence, reminded him that obedience under the Christian creed was the first of virtues, and banished him from the island. The knight, conscious of his error, bowed in silence, divested himself of his knightly mantle, kissed the hand of the master, and was about to go. The stern superior was softened; he called him back, and, presenting him again with his sword and mantle, informed him that his prompt submission and penitence has restored him to the rank which his disobedience had forfeited.

6. One other feature is strikingly characteristic of the earlier literature of Europe, although good taste at a later period has pretty well weeded out its traces, viz. the singular and incongruous mixture of science with poetry. The literary men of the time were learned men, familiar with theology and with the writings of the ancients, and delighted with the abstractions and refinements of a mystical theology and a scholastic logic; and that which interested them in reality, they unconsciously incorporated with their poetry. This tendency tinges the whole Italian poetry, from Dante to Ariosto. Petrarch, even while singing of love, cannot allow the subject to pass without some learned and complimentary allusions to Aristotle. The Spanish lyric poetry of Boscan, Garcilaso, and their successors, is a sort of versified Platonism. The verses of Ronsard, and the other worthies composing that poetical constellation which arrogated to itself the name of the Pleiades, are so full of learned allusions as to be absolutely unintelligible; and the influence of this somewhat pedantic exhibition of ancient literature is undeniable even in our own Milton.

Having premised these remarks on some of the characteristic features of distinction which separate the religious, reflective, warlike, and mystic poetry of modern Europe, from the airy, graceful, and transparent spirit of the classical, we may observe, that although, as we mentioned, nearly seven centuries elapsed before the appearance of any poet of permanent European reputation, poetry was not entirely idle during the intervening period; but, on the contrary, towards its close at least, in a state of high activity and fertility of production. Scarcely, indeed, had the different languages of Europe begun to arrange themselves into form, before poetry in a rude form made its appearance. Perhaps in Germany the cradle of the modern poetry of Europe may most probably be found. By the time of Charlemagne, it is certain that country contained a vast mass of legendary poetry, which was carefully collected, committed to writing by the directions of the emperor, with a view to preservation, but of which scarcely a traditional fragment now remains. Earlier than the time of Charlemagne (a. d. 740 to 814), in all probability, were the lays of the Nibelungen and the Heldenbuch composed, though they have descended to us only in the altered form given to them when recast by FIcnry of Afterdingen. The former carries back its scenes to the days of Attila the Hun; and in truthful simplicity and vividness of painting, its homely and nervous verses are even yet worthy of admiration. A fund of bold and rich invention is, in like manner, displayed in the Sagas of Scandinavia, the mytho logy of which, at a later date, came to exert a strong influence over the poetry of Europe.

The Provençal language, the first-born of European tongues, in which Thcbaut afterwards sung, and Coeur de Lion expressed his complaints in prison, we find moulded into form about the close of the ninth century. The Provencals had undoubtedly borrowed many things besides rhyme from the Arabian literature of the Peninsula, for an oriental spirit is visible in many of their compositions, and much of their imagery. But, on the other hand, they added much from their independent stores; they w idely extended the domain of poetry, gave it spirit as well as refinement; they even rendered it, as Villemain observes, a substitute for the liberty of the press; while their forms of versification, canzoni, sonnets, sestine, madrigals, &c. soon became the patterns adopted by all the southern languages of Europe. Their compositions, introduced into Germany through the Hohenstauffen emperors, instantly communicated a marked impulse to German poetry: the numerous band of the Minnesingers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are, in fact, the Provençals of Germany.

In the north of France, again, arises, during the same period, the literature of the Trouveres; a literature of satires and legends, and tales of knavery, licentious gallantry and adventure, destined afterwards strongly to influence the direction of the genius of Boccacio, and his successors the Italian novelists, and to furnish the amplest materials for later writers of fiction. Nor during this creative period were fictions of a higher cast wanting.

Three leading cycles of romance may indeed be pointed out, which owe their origin to this period. The first consists of the legends of Gothic, Frankish, and Burgundian heroes, during the times of the great northern emigrations, of which the Nibelungen and the Heldenbuch are the depositories; legends breathing a purely northern spirit, and generally having some foundation in history: the second, those which embody the traditions as to Charlemagne’s wars against the Saracens, the achievements of his court of Paladins, and the “dolorosa rotta” at Roscesvalles, where he is represented as perishing with all his peerage. In these Charlemagne is strangely represented, not as a most warlike and energetic monarch, but rather in the garb of a lazy and luxurious eastern sultan; a perversion of historical truth which, Frederick Schlegel thinks, must be accounted for by the poems which refer to the emperor having been chiefly written by Normans, who drew their notions of Charlemagne from some of those faineant monarchs of their own days, whom they saw in possession of his throne. It is certain, at all events, that the legends connected with Charlemagne soon became largely interwoven with incidents of a comic cast, and with a mass of absurd and fantastic machinery. The third class of romantic traditions then first embodied in poetry are those relating to the fabulous Arthur, “begirt with British and Armorie knights ;” by far the most interesting of which is the celebrated legend of a pathetic and elegiac character, which bears the name of Tristan or Tristram. “Among all the great and epic poems of love and chivalry in the middle ages,” says Frederick Schlegel, “the first place is given by all nations to Tristram; but that we may not be fatigued with uniformity of fiction, the airy and lively legend of Launcelot is placed by the side of its more grave and elegiac representations.” He traces also in these legends of Arthur and the Round Table a double purpose; an allegorical character, viz. an attempt to shadow forth the ideal of a spiritual and Christian knighthood, imparting to them in general a higher character than to the corresponding traditions of Charlemagne.

One other class of the compositions of the middle ages may be alluded to, their monkish hymns, written in Latin, that is to say, the bastard Latin of the period, and generally[7:18:158] in rhyme. They cannot indeed be praised for their novelty of thought, or high imagination; but their earnestness of purpose, whether in describing ideas of terror or pity, and which was the expression of one belief and one heart pervading many nations, give them a considerable hold over the mind. No one can be insensible to the awful grandeur of the Pies irae, dies ilia, which Roscommon, who translated it into English, is said to have died repeating; or the simple pathos of the Stabat mater dolorosa, which, even divested of the charms of Pergolesi’s music, speaks to the heart. Of nearly equal beauty are the Jam moesta quiesce querela of Prudentius; and the Ave Maris Stella, being an invocation to the Virgin, which may still be traced in the songs of the boatmen of the Mediterranean. The forcible impression made by these simple sacred hymns on the mind of Dante is obvious, from the manner in which lines or portions of lines from them, are here and there woven into the terza rima of his great poem.

It cannot therefore be said that the middle ages were an unpoetical period. On the contrary, there was then a very general diffusion of poetic feeling. But the poetry to which it gave rise was not marked by any of those works of excellence rising conspicuously above the rest, which attract attention to the names of the authors. Its productions are chiefly anonymous; its poets have died and made no sign. A great genius was still wanting to form an epoch in the annals of poetry; but that genius was found in Dante, about a century after the Tuscan dialect had assumed a predominance over the other dialects of Italy.

The Divine Comedy of Dante (born 1265, died 1321) is the first work of distinguished and original genius which graces the literature of modern Europe; and it is in many respects a most striking and remarkable production. It is not, as the name would import, a drama; as little does it resemble an epic poem; it is an allegorical pilgrimage through heaven, hell, and paradise, which the poet has peopled with human shapes, human passions and crimes. He has made his poem an instrument through which he vents his political loves and hatreds, his vast and undigested learning, his scholastic acuteness, his mystical philosophy, his reverence for the ancients, his sympathy with the spirit of freedom, the enterprise, the enthusiasm of the moderns. It resembles, in fact, the Homeric poems in its encyclopaediac character. The poet stands, as it were, on an isthmus, from which he can cast back his glances across the tumultuous and still heaving chaos of the middle ages, into the serener regions of the past, and forward into a futurity of which he foresees and foretells the coming glories. Many, no doubt, had been the allegorical compositions which went before him; the Roman de la Rose, indeed, still survives, in the translation of which Chaucer wasted so much of his earlier powers; but all have been thrown into shade, and it may be said effaced, by the grasp, magnificence, and sombre power, combined with deep human feeling, of the great allegorical pageant of Dante. For in this last quality, quite as much as in the attributes of sublimity and grandeur, which are universally conceded to him, lies the secret of that perennial charm of freshness which still gives interest to the Divina Commedia. Amidst the darkest scenes of inferna, punishment some soothing objects or images are constantly introduced to lighten our pilgrimage, and flowers are made to spring up beneath our feet, as if to freshen the path “over the burning marle.” His wearisome metaphysics have long ceased to please; his mystic raptures, his pictures of the celestial occupations of the saints, appear almost ludicrous; his demons and his Satan grotesque rather than impressive: but the deep pathos of the story of Francesea of Rimini; the thrilling scenes in the town of Hunger; the few simple lines which tell the story of Madonna della Pia, imbibing a slow but certain death among the swamps of the Maremma, to which she is consigned by a jealous husband; the sweet apostrophe to evening, and the fireside recollections which the sound of the vesper-bell brings along with it: these and such episodes are the passages which linger in the memories of all, and give to the poem of Dante its main hold over the heart.

The imagination, on the other hand, is singularly roused by the scenes of torture and bliss through which we are led, the burning tombs, and cities alive with flame, and valleys of the shadow of death, where serpents torture their victims, and the ever-deepening descent through the circles of hell, contrasted with the cheering light which begins to break upon us in the ascending circles of purgatory, and the refulgence of the visions which greet the wanderer on his entrance into paradise, when he exchanges the guidance of Virgil forthat of Beatrice.

Distinct as the imagery in the foreground is, the prospect fades away on all sides into the illimitable, and the imagination has full room to expand itself in the sphere of the mysterious and indefinite. Dante’s poem may, indeed, be well compared to that “wild and hoary wood” in which he describes himself as losing his way in the outset, with here and there a path cut through the trees, where the sunshine pours in and shows spots of verdure or still waters, but backed on all sides by dusky labyrinths, inhabited by beasts of prey, into the gloom of which the eye can hardly pierce, and the immemorial stillness of which the sound of human footsteps has never broken.

The style of Dante’s poem is scarcely less remarkable than its spirit. Obscure and unyielding, as might be expected, in some parts, it has, nevertheless, a picturesqueness without parallel in modern literature. It makes every object palpable or sensible; flashing images upon the mind with the rapidity and the splendour of lightning. “They are,” says Ugo Foscolo, “the bold and prominent figures of an alto-relievo, which, it seems, we might almost touch, and of which the imagination readily supplies those parts that are hidden from the view.” It fixed the Italian language, so that at this moment it remains less changed since the time of Dante than any other European tongue.

As Dante is the head of the Italian allegorical poetry, so Petrarch may be regarded as the founder of the lyrical; borrowing indeed his manner, and not a little of his matter also, from the Provençale, but by a refined taste acquired from the deepest study of the classic poetry, and a sensibility, the liveliness of which was quickened by a real passion, investing their strains with a character of tenderness and perfect finish, which really appear to confer on them a different character. The monotony disappears of which we are conscious in reading the compositions of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, “qui toujours d’un même ton semblent salmodier ;” and a wonderful variety of emotions are seen to arise out of a theme which, in their hands, had appeared limited and barren. No one has ever drawn a finer poetical ideal of female loveliness, purity, and worth, than Petrarch has done in Laura. “Every lover,” says Herder, “will find his Laura in that of Petrarch; he will find his own heart, with all its weakness, and that beneficent influence which the female character in its purity can erect over the disposition of the youth and the man.” The verbal subtilties and plays on words which disfigure many of the lyrics of Petrarch no doubt detract from their effect, and excite surprise that one whose taste was in general so pure should have given admittance to such conceits; but, like the puns and equivoques of Shakspeare’s time, they were part of the fashion of the day. Petrarch found them imbedded, as it were, in the Provençal poetry from which he drew, and he yielded, like Shakspeare, to the evil influence of the time. Upon the whole, however, the services rendered by him as an Italian poet (for we need not here allude to his great and most bene*·
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ficial influence on the taste of Europe, by his exertions on behalf of classical literature) have been very great; he sensibly added to the polish, grace, and pliancy, of the Italian tongue; and of the Platonic poetry of love, a love existing rather as a lambent glow than as a flame, and living on as a sentiment after it has ceased to be a passion, Petrarch still remains the purest and the most charming representative. (See the article Petrarch.)

It is a remarkable fact, that though the genius of Dante was unquestionably far more masculine, original, and imposing than that of Petrarch, the former left no successors, while Petrarch turned for nearly two centuries the whole current of poetry into the direction of the amatory lyric. Dante was found to be unapproachable; within the circle he had formed, none durst walk but he; but the Platonism of Petrarch, and the apparent simplicity and brevity of the medium through which his tranquil and gentle inspiration was conveyed, appear to have tempted every one into imitation of his lyrics. Hence, until the fifteenth century in Italy was well advanced, its poetry consisted of little else than imitations of Petrarch. But, in truth, though this was not perceived, all the finer essence of Petrarch’s poetical character was nearly as incommunicable as that of Dante; and accordingly we find, among the latter Petrarchists, that much of the delicacy and truth of Petrarch, that∕ce‰^ which gives a tempered warmth to his expressions, and calms without chilling the heart, disappears. The raptures of love, and that struggle of passion and reason which so constantly recurs in Petrarch’s poetry, are pitched in an exaggerated and falsetto key; the conceits grow more numerous as the feeling grows less intense and real; till at last, of all which their great original had produced, little is found transplanted into their imitations, save the indestructible harmony of the versification.

The fifteenth century, which followed the death of Petrarch, is fruitful in learned men, in grammarians and philosophers, but barren in poetry. The excessive cultivation of classical literature, and the admiration excited by its great models, created a feeling of distaste for Italian composition. Traces, no doubt, of a teeming fancy appear in the unfinished stanze of Politian; and the rustic and car-nivalesque songs, both of the great Lorenzo and of Machiavelli, have a merit independently of the interest attached to their authorship. Machiavelli’s comedy of the Man-dagola has been pronounced by a competent judge to be amongst the best specimens of the comic which the Italians possess. But till the rise of that branch of poetry which may be regarded as the peculiarly national poetry of Italy, namely, the serio-comic romance of chivalry, nothing of a marked or original character appears. W e turn, therefore, at once to the dawn of that school in the rough poem of Pulci.

There seems little doubt that feudalism, with that attendant spirit of chivalry which was born of its union with religion, never obtained any great influence in Italy. Petrarch even speaks of the warlike fictions of romance with dislike and contempt; and indeed, from the earliest periods, we can perceive the traces of a commercial much more than a military spirit; inclining the nation, in the adoption of foreign models, to turn with far greater interest to the gay, lively, and licentious tales of the Trouveres, or the dreamy reveries of the Provençal poets, than to those tales of chivalry, the “romans de longue haleine,” which formed the study and the delight of the rest of Europe.

Before the period, too, when the Italians first thought of resorting to the fictions of chivalry as the materials of poetry, the feeling of chivalry itself was generally on the decline throughout, Europe, and its high-flown sentiments and extravagances in action were beginning to be looked upon as a superannuated and exploded fashion. Hence the consciousness of a certain air of ridicule attaching itself to themes of this kind must from the first have been present to the minds of the Italian poets; and accordingly the chief puzzle connected with the work of Pulci, the Mor-gante Maggiore, is, whether the work be of a serious nature, or an elaborate jest; or whether, as seems more probable, it be not a jumble of both.

All the Italian poets who have adopted these fabulous themes of chivalry seem, in fact, to have perceived that, in their own country at least, the taste for romance, if it ever existed, had gone by, and that a .serious poem, in the style of the prose romances of chivalry, would have met merely with ridicule or neglect. Their aim, therefore, seems to have been to avail themselves merely of the fictions and machinery of romance, as affording a new source of poetical embellishment; to address no higher feeling than the principle of curiosity aroused by complicated adventure; and to anticipate, by a tone of levity, and a gaiety approaching to the comic, that ridicule with which they felt that the spirit of chivalry had begun to be associated. They wrote “as if they mocked themselves, that could be moved to sigh at any thing.” This aim is visible in them all; they differ only in the degree of art, taste, and genius with which the result at which they aimed has been accompanied.

In the rude poem of Luigi Pulci (born 1431, died 1487), there is no harmony whatever between the extremes of the tragic and comic. The poet appears to be in one page sincerely devout; in the next he seems a profligate and scoffer. The broadest farce in the adventures of the good-natured but stupid giant Morgante, alternates with the elevated and the pathetic in the really chivalrous enthusiasm of the battle of Roncesvalles and the death of Orlando; the dreariest platitudes are succeeded by occasional outbreakings of devotional enthusiasm or fine sentiment. The effect of the whole is disjointed and painful, and such as to excite our surprise that the accomplished companion and favourite of the great Lorenzo should have produced a work so enigmatical and unsatisfactory.

With more invention and greater variety than Pulci (for ' in the construction of plots, and in sketching the outline of characters, Boiardo left little for Ariosto to perform), and with far less of that disposition to caricature in which Pulci unconsciously indulges, the Orlando Innamorato of Matteo Maria Boiardo (1430 to 1494) still wants that airy grace and ease of movement, that unconscious flow, like the marvellous tale of an Arabian improvisatore, without which this species of poem,—a “chartered libertine,” in as far as regards the ordinary canons of criticism,—can have no permanent success. In Boiardo’s hands it moves laboriously and stiffly; his verse wants harmony; his style wants pruning, polishing, and lightening. This, together with the infusion into the poem of a most peculiar species of grave humour, was the service afterwards performed for Boiardo by Berni, with such perfect success, indeed, that the rifaccimenlo has superseded and almost obliterated the recollection of the original.

It remained, however, for Ariosto (1474-1533) to hit the happy medium between the poco meno and poco piu ; to blend the tragic and comic in the proper proportions suited to the serio-comic epic; to give life and natural movement to the mere machines of his predecessors; to throw over his recitals an air of simplicity and bonkommie, which gives probability to the wildest marvels; and to invest the whole airy tissue of romance, with a style, the peculiar charm of jvħich, though most clearly felt, appears, almost indescribable; so clear, so popular and translucent, as to charm the most uneducated; so correct and classical as to satisfý*the most critical taste. To compare Ariosto to Tasso as a poet of feeling, is to compare objects absolutely disparate, and unsuited to comparison. Probably the native cheerfulness and easy temper of his mind was not consistent with strong [7:18:160]emotion; but it is equally clear, that the expression of strong emotion was inconsistent with his plan. To have grafted the deep and serious interests and passions of men upon so gossamer a groundwork as that which he has adopted, would have been like building an edifice of marble upon the unsubstantial basis of a summer cloud. In the department he assigned to himself he has employed the most appropriate instruments with corresponding success. After Homer, he has been, on the whole, the favourite poet of Europe. Above sixty editions of the Orlando were published in the course of the sixteenth century alone. “The Orlando Furioso,” says Mr Hallam, in summing up a most just and discriminating criticism of Ariosto, in his Introduction to the Literature of Europe, “as a single great poem, has been very rarely surpassed in the living records of poetry. Ariosto must yield to three, and only three, of his predecessors. He has not the force, simplicity, and truth to nature, of Homer, the exquisite style and sustained majesty of Virgil, nor the originality and boldness of Dante. The most obvious parallel is Ovid, whose Metamorphoses, however, are far excelled by the Orlando Furioso, not in fertility of invention, or variety of images and sentiments, but in purity of taste, in grace of language, and harmony of versification.”

The incongruous elements of devotion and ribaldry, caricature and tragic emotion, which had been left unblended by Pulci, which Boiardo partly rejected and partly harmonized, had received from the pen of Ariosto the last graces of which such a poem was susceptible. In him there is even a gentle pathos combined with a sort of enthusiasm of valour, which gives sincerity and elevation to the fantastic. But the serious and brooding fancy of his successor Tasso (born 1544, died 1595) could not be contented to sing, like Ariosto, “le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,” in the same light, and at times half-mocking strain. He determined to present the serious side of the romantic epic, as Ariosto had done the comic. Whether the dull “Gazette in verse,” by Trissino, the Italia Liberata, in any way suggested to him the idea of a historical subject, we know not. Certain it is, however, that his earnestness of purpose, his deep and at last morbid sensibilities, impelled him to the selection of a theme where reality should give steadiness and human interest to the creations of imagination; and where the spirit of the Christian religion should be the moving principle, instead of a phantasm which played round the head rather than touched the heart. This theme he sought and successfully found in the delivery of the Holy Sepulchre by the crusaders; an event more interesting to Christianity than had been the Trojan expedition to the assembled princes of Asia; and satisfying that essential condition of a good epic, that its action, whatever its importance, shall be one springing from enthusiastic feeling rather than political motives. His poem was written while the European monarchs still flattered themselves with the hope of regaining the lost conquests of Godfrey in the Holy Land, and the glorious exploits at Malta, at Rhodes, at the Goletta, and Lepanto, showqd the strength of the feeling that still prevailed “against the general enemy, Ottoman and dealing as it did with a topic of religious interest, placed among scenes hallowed by the most affecting recollections, and presenting the finest natural features for the pencil of the poet; admitting, from the remoteness of the period to which it related, and the faith which then prevailed, the introduction of a fabulous agency, contrasting with the impressive machinery which the Christian religion afforded, it is difficult to conceive a theme uniting more features of interest, or affording a richer or more picturesque groundwork for an epic poem.

Tasso has conceived his plan in the spirit of antiquity, and in the grand and enlarged style of the classic epic; but he has executed it in the spirit of the middle ages; and perhaps the point in which Tasso has been more completely successful, is the skill with which the spirit of a religious chivalry is breathed into the classic framework; and all the incidents which he liberally borrows from Homer or Virgil, are made to harmonize with that prevailing tone of devotion, valour, and tenderness, which is spread like an atmosphere of purity over the Jerusalem Delivered.

Whilst the general plan of the Jerusalem, perhaps, bears too close a resemblance to that of Homer, in the retirement of Rinaldo, like Achilles, from the army, which is made the nodus of the poem, the singular beauty of its episodes has been always felt and admitted. In fact, it is by the episodes that we chiefly remember the poem. Tasso has thrown, the whole tenderness of his soul into such passages as those where he describes Sofronia and Olindo at the stake, the “pastoral melancholy” of Erminia’s residence with the shepherds, or Clorinda perishing by the hand of him who would willingly have died to save her. The turn of his mind, in fact, was fully more towards the lyrical than the epic, and, in passages like these, the lyrical tendency breaks forth with peculiar force and flow.

In his characters Tasso has not made any very substantial addition to the picture gallery of the ancients, though even in this respect he is superior to Ariosto, who in most cases contents himself with a few general types without distinctive traits. Tasso’s male characters, with one exception, that of Tancred, are judicious adaptations of Homer’s outlines of character to other times, manners, and religious creeds. Tancred, however, is an original conception; perhaps the more striking that its outline was drawn in some measure from within; for in Tancred, the brave, visionary, melancholy Tancred, the victim of a hopeless passion, we probably see a dim reflection of the poet himself.

The same broad line of distinction which divides Ariosto and Tasso as to the conception of their subjects, may be traced in the whole details of their execution. Ariosto is throughout a painter. It is with external things that he chiefly deals; with colour, arrangement, form, and grouping, rather than with their internal spirit. But Tasso cannot paint this objectively. Every image, every feeling, as it passes through his mind, receives the stamp of his own peculiar habits of thought, and issues forth impressed with the image and superscription of his own tender and loving soul.

Though Tasso is best known by his great epic, his Aminta deserves notice as the finest of those pastoral dramas which were so common in Italy in the sixteenth century and the commencement of the seventeenth. It was not indeed the earliest, for the Sagrifizio of Agostino Beccari (1510-1590) had preceded it. And even Beccari’s work had grown out of those pastorals, frequently in dialogue, of which the fifteenth century was so fruitful, and of which the Arcadia of Sannazzaro (1458-1530) affords the finest example. Tasso’s, however, of all the Italian pastoral dramas, is the most inspired by the spirit of poetry. The Pastor Fido of Guarini (1537-1612) certainly has the advantage of a far more stirring plot; it rouses more curiosity and attention, but it wants the charm, the truly Arcadian repose, which Tasso has spread over his Aminta. Here also, as in his Tancred, the feelings of the poet gave vivacity and truth to the poem; for it is not difficult to see, that under the disguise of Amyntas, and in the form of allusions to the joys and sufferings of the pastoral life, or invectives against that influence of rank and honour by which the natural feelings of the heart are suppressed, the lover of Leonora is pleading his owm cause, or his own apology.

For an account of the Italian drama, which took its rise in the Sophonisba of Trissino (born 1478, died 1550), the reader is again referred to the article Drama in this work.

One species of poetry, which is almost peculiar to Italy, distinguishes or rather disgraces this period, viz. that mass [7:18:161]of poems entitled Capitoli, &c. which obtained the name of Bernesque from the poet who first set the example of these specimens of reckless and indecent drollery, Francesco Berni (died about 1543). His quiet, grave humour, the host of ludicrous associations which he conjures up, and frequent felicities of expression, at first render even his ribaldry amusing; but when similar themes were taken up and hunted down by Molza, Casa, Firenzuola, and their followers, it became oppressive and revolting in the highest degree.

We now approach the period of decline in Italian p-oetry. The sixteenth century had been its golden period: in the seventeenth we drop at once into the age of brass, or the age of tinsel. Chiabrera (born 1552, died 1637) indeed exhibits lyric fire, and, by discarding the hackneyed and outworn form of the Italian versification of the Provençal school, and approximating to the metres of the ancients, gave a character of originality to his odes. Yet, granting the boldness of his imagery, and a certain fervour and enthusiasm, which raise his lyric poetry above the slumbrous and monotonous beauty of most of his predecessors who were of the school of Petrarch, it is yet impossible to subscribe to the excessive eulogiums bestowed upon him by Tiraboschi, who almost seems to think he had combined in Italian the graces of Anacreon with the majesty of Pindar. More impressive, more affecting, though occasionally, and particularly in his sonnets, more deformed by the conceits and exaggerations which give an evil distinction to the poets of this period, whom the Italians have branded with the title of Seicentisti, are the lyrics of the senator Filicaja (born 1642, died 1707), whose religious canzoni, particularly the noble triumphal hymn on the deliverance of Vienna from the Turks by John Sobieski, are amongst the finest specimens of this class of poetry of which Italy has to boast. In his sonnets he is less pure and less natural; even his famous sonnet on Italy is, in its second quatrain, disfigured by one of the poorest and coldest of conceits. One other name must be mentioned, as preserving a pure and classic taste amidst the general corruption which, under the influence of Marini, was now pervading and perverting the whole spirit of Italian poetry. We refer to Fulvio Testi (1593-1646), the Italian Horace, as he has been called, a title certainly quite unmerited, so far as regards the power or brilliancy of his imagination, but not inappropriate, if limited to the purity and terseness of his style. The greater corrupter of this declining period of Italian literature is the once famous Marini (born 1569, died 1625), the author of the Adone, a poem which is an absolute chaos of brilliant antitheses and exaggerated language, plays of wit and ingenious imagery, but heaped together without the slightest direction of any governing judgment, and producing a tiresome and chilling, instead of an exciting effect. In his own days his writings were differently estimated. For a time, indeed, his popularity in his own country was boundless, and his influence on the literature of other countries, particularly that of Spain, as powerful as it was mischievous. But good sense and good taste shortly resumed their sway, and Rousseau, if one may judge from the frequent quotations from Marini in his Heloise, would almost appear to be the last person of any literary distinction who was familiar with the once celebrated and now completely forgotten Adone.

In comic poetry, however, the seventeenth century was more successful. To this period belongs the Secchia Ra-pitaof Tassoni (1565-1635), the first specimen of that style which was afterwards carried to perfection in the Lutrin and the Rape of the Lock. The imitations of Tassoni need not be mentioned. Instead of improving on his model, they degraded and vulgarized it.

Excepting in the drama, which was distinguished by the great and strongly contrasted genius of Metastasio and Alfieri, the eighteenth century in Italy can boast of little in poetry. Some graceful fables by Pignotti, imitations of

Pope by Parini, and of Gray and Young by Pindemonte, redeem it from the charge of utter barrenness, but cannot entitle it to the praise of originality. Nor, with the exception of Manzoni, has the nineteenth century produced any poem which can justly be said to have attained a European reputation.

Of all the languages formed from the ruins of the Latin, the Spanish approaches the nearest to the Italian. The spirit of the two literatures differs extremely; but so closely do the words resemble each other, that translations have been executed by Spaniards from the Italian, as in the case of Jauregui’s translation of Tasso’s Aminta, where even whole lines are found to correspond with the original. The language, as it now exists, is the dialect of Castille, polished and purified, the Catalonian or Limousin having long ceased to be the language of poetry.

One feature peculiarly marks the whole of the Spanish poetry with a character unknown to that of the rest of Europe, viz. the strong traces of orientalism which it exhibits, a tendency to the pompous and the exaggerated, and a strange compound of strong passion, combining with a great wantonness and luxuriance of fancy. More or less this feature is to be traced through all the changes which its poetry has undergone; subdued, no doubt, and kept down by the good taste of such men as Garcilaso or Cervantes, but re-appearing in the estilo culto of Calderon, and reaching its height in the ludicrous extravagancies of the Spanish Marini, Gongora. Considering, indeed, the intimate connection which subsisted between Spain and Arabia from the eighth down to the close of the fourteenth century, a connection which, though one of hostility in the field, appeared to have admitted of many of the ties of friendship and mutual respect, and the natural admiration which the brilliant poetry of Arabia was likely to exercise over the minds of a ruder people, the Asiatic character of the Spanish poetical genius appears exactly what, under such relations, might have been expected.

The earliest monument of the Spanish poetry is the old Chronicle of the Cid, a cycle of romantic legends, founded upon the exploits and misfortunes of that Don Rodrigo Lay-nez who, after exalting the glory of the Spanish arms under Ferdinand king of Castille, and his son Don Sancho, was treated with such ingratitude by Alfonso VI., the son of the latter, that he fled to the Moorish court, where, from 1081 to 1085, he gained many brilliant victories over the Christian arms. Again recalled to the Spanish court by Alfonso, who began to feel his value, he was a second time disgraced, and banished about 1090. The Chronicle, which, both from internal and external evidence, appears to be as old as the twelfth century, relates to this second banishment; and though its language is rude, and its rhymes most imperfect, there is a captivating freshness in the scenes which it presents, in its vivacity of movement, and in the occasional traits of poetry which seem to escape almost involuntarily from the writer, that raise it considerably above the ordinary level of such chronicles.

From the date of the poem of the Cid to the reign of John II. (1407-1454), the only monuments of Spanish poetry, at least the only specimens possessing the slightest interest, consist in that vast mass of popular or ballad poetry in which Spain is richer than any other country in Europe. Fortunately the process of collecting and preserving these relics of an adventurous and enthusiastic period, “ere polity, sedate and sage, had quenched the fires of feudal rage,” was commenced at a very early period, the first collection having appeared in 1510, under the title of the Canxionerο General. Not only in numbers, however, but in merit, the Spanish ballad poetry appears superior to that of any other nation of Europe. Everything, in fact, united to give to this species of poetry its freest development. A national [7:18:162]character of strong sensibility, excitable yet constant; national pride, in the feeling that they had so long formed the advanced guard of Europe against the Moors, and were daily driving backward the tide of invasion; a life of adventure and gallantry; a strong passion for music and the dance; a delicious climate; a language rich in rhymes, and admitting a species of versification (the assonance), in which “Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,” were here found united. The result has been a collection of ballads of all kinds, warlike, amatory, Moorish (these last chiefly composed after the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492), and satirical, marked by a degree of taste and poetical beauty, of which very few of our English or Scottish ballads have to boast. The Moorish ballads have a peculiar charm, from the richness of the colouring with which they are invested, and their style, which has hit the happy medium between the boldness of some of the old historical ballads, and the over-refinement and affectation of those which were composed after the introduction of the Italian taste into Spanish poetry. The picturesque character of the Moorish life, the natural beauties and artificial magnificence of Granada, the quarrels of the rival families of the Zegris and the Abencerrages, the tournaments, feasts of canes, and other amusements of the luxurious court of Boabdil, afford in these ballads inexhaustible materials for descriptive poetry, a tendency which is hardly to be traced in the earlier ballads. “It is wonderful,” says a very eminent Spanish critic, Quintana, “with what vigour and brevity they paint scenes, personages, and feelings. In one it is the Alcayde of Molina, who enters, rousing the Moors against the Christians, who are ravaging their fields; in another, the unfortunate Aliatar, borne back with the gloom of a funeral procession, through the gate from which he had issued with such gaiety the day before; now it is a simple country maiden, who, having lost the ear-rings her lover had given her, weeps at the prospect of the reproaches which await her; and now a shepherd, who, solitary and forsaken, grows indignant at the sight of two turtles cooing in a neighbouring poplar, and drives them away with a stone.” Besides the ballads descriptive of incidents, these collections contain many charming little songs and lyrical snatches, vague and undefined, indeed, but often pleasing us even by this very vagueness, which merely suggests a hint to the mind, and leaves the rest to be filled up by the imagination. With few exceptions, the authors of these lyrics arc unknown. A few are attributed to the great Don Juan Manuel (who died in 1362), but on doubtful evidence; the writers of the others have died and made no sign.

Though the Spaniards date the rise of their classic poetry from the reign of John II., it is certain this period contains little which has any interest for foreign readers. The pedantic and tedious labyrinth of Juan de Mena (1412-1456), a cold and lifeless imitation of Dante’s great poem, possesses nothing of a more classical nature than the older poetry, save its form. One poem only of this period, viz. the noble stanzas or coplas written by Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father, and a few graceful redondillas by the accomplished Marquis of Santillana, afford some relief from the pretension and pedantry which generally characterize this period of Spanish poetry.

A great revolution, however, was about to be effected in Spanish taste, by the introduction at once of the measures and of the spirit of the Italian poetry. The close relation into which Spain was brought with Italy during the reign of Charles V. had led to a general knowledge of the treasures of Italian poetry; while many changes in the political constitution and habits of the Spaniards themselves concurred to weaken their attachment to their old and natural romantic poetry, and disposed them to adopt the more regular and polished strains of their Italian neighbours. This change was introduced by Don Juan Boscan (from about

1500 to 1544), who, though he had at first composed and published a volume of poems in the old Spanish manner, had been led, by his acquaintance with the Venetian ambassador Navagero, to the study of the Italian classics, and in consequence formed the design, in conjunction with his friend Garcilaso de la Vega (1500—1536), of introducing to his countrymen the refinements of the Italian versification, and the superior polish of the style of the Petrarchists. But with all Boscan’s careful study of the Italian poets, which is evident from the perpetual imitations which his poetry contains, of Petrarch, Bembo, and Sannazzaro, he never could acquire their elegance of taste, nor divest himself of the national tendency to orientalism. Something of the old leaven of impetuosity and hyperbole attaches to his poetry, producing a feeling of incoherence between the matter itself and the medium through which the ideas are conveyed.

But what Boscan attempted and imperfectly performed, Garcilaso accomplished with complete success. He was equally distinguished in the field of warfare and of literature. “One hand the sword employed, and one the pen and he fell at last, crowned at once with the laurels of poetry and war. In Garcilaso the Italian poets found a rival, if not a superior; for while he adopted their best points, he avoided in a great measure that subtilty of taste which had grown out of the study of the later Platonists, and introduced a metaphysical and reasoning style into those subjects where it was the most out of place. Garcilaso has written little, but that little (at least his Eclogues, for his Sonnets are not of equal merit) is of the highest class; for he has contrived so finely to temper the subtilty of the Italian poets by the more natural warmth of the Spanish, and to clothe his sentiments in words at once so simple and so classically pure, that the result is something superior to any thing that is to be found in his models. In all of them, no doubt, the classic reader will recognize at every turn resemblances to the Latin poets; but these imitations are introduced with so much taste, and fitted with such art into a Spanish framework, that the knowledge that they are imitations rather increases than diminishes our sense of the talent of the poet.

A third personage was associated with Boscan and Garcilaso in this poetical triumvirate, the famous “tyrant of Sienna,” the accomplished warrior, statesman, historian, novelist, and poet, Diego de Mendoza (1500-1575). Mendoza’s Epistles, however, betray more rudeness of manner than even the verses of Boscan; and indeed the chief feature of interest which they possess, is the singular spectacle they present of a stern and hardhearted warrior of the school of the Duke of Alva breathing out to his friends Boscan and Zuniga the most fervent aspirations after the domestic happiness of a rural life, or longings for the enjoyment of a philosophical solitude. This feature indeed more or less marks the whole poetry of the period. Whilst the Spanish warriors were distinguished all over Europe for their ferocity, presenting, as Sismondi says, “to the enemy a front of iron, and to the unfortunate an iron heart,” we find all their poetry marked with a dreamy, tender, and melancholy spirit. In Mendoza, Garcilaso, and Montemayor, all of whom were soldiers, and conversant with scenes little calculated to soften the affections, we observe this union of practical ferocity with theoretical innocence; nay, even the terrible Duke of Alva appears to have been inspired by the same tastes, and appears in the poetry of the time, not as the ferocious governor of the Low Countries and the organ of the Inquisition, but as the discerning critic, the lover and the patron of literature.

This tendency to themes of an Arcadian cast gave rise to the Pastorals of Montemayor (1520-1561) and his successors. The Diana of Montemayor, a pastoral romance, interspersed with ballads and canzoni in the style of Sannazzaro[7:18:163]’s Arcadia, was once amongst the most popular productions of Europe. Its influence may be traced, not only in the host of Spanish pastorals which succeeded it, but in the literature of other countries, in the Astrea of D’Urfé, and in the Arcadia of our own Sir Philip Sydney. Cervantes bestows upon it a sort of qualified praise in his review of Don Quixote’s Library, but is disposed to give the preference to the continuation by Gil Polo over the original. Montemayor labours, in fact, under the fault of all his countrymen of the time; he cannot compress; he pours out a stream of musical language, “which runs, and, as it runs, for ever would run on ;” but he gives us few ideas that are at once natural and new, and none that stir the heart or strongly awaken the imagination.

The works of Herrera, another poet of this period (1500- 1578), on whom the Spaniards have, with questionable propriety, bestowed the title of “the Divine,” are in a totally different strain. His themes are religious and warlike, such as the triumph of the Christian arms at Lepanto, or the fatal defeat of Sebastian in his expedition to Africa. Of all the Spanish poets, Herrera, whose mind was deeply imbued with the beauties of the sacred writings, possesses the loftiest style of expression; but the majesty of his diction is often obscured by strange and new creations or combinations of words, while his elevation not unfrequently explodes in palpable bombast. There is a strong resemblance between Herrera and the Italian Cliiabrera, both in their beauties and their faults.

The greatest of the Spanish lyrical writers is Luis Ponce de Leon (1527-1591). “More earnest and enthusiastic than Boscan; tender as Garcilaso, but with a soul whose tenderness was engrossed by heavenly, not earthly love; pure and high-hearted, with the nobility of genius stamped upon his brow, but with religious resignation calming his heart, he is different from his predecessors, but more complete; a man Spain only could produce, for in Spain only had religion such sovereign sway as wholly to reduce the rebel inclinations of man, and, by substituting supernal for terrestrial love, not diminish the fulness and tenderness of passion, but only give it another object.”^[5. Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, vol. iii. p. 70. ] The most remarkable feature of Luis de Leon’s poetry, is the union of a mystical and religious enthusiasm with the most perfect clearness and transparency of expression. Never was a high and soaring imagination more perfectly under the control of a cool judgment and a critical taste. Whilst a religious Platonism forms the fond of his odes, the style exhibits all the terseness, precision, and finish, of that of Horace, of whom, notwithstanding the great differences in their poetical character, he continually reminds us, by the sententious air of his odes, and that serene moral wisdom which drops from him in common with the Epicurean poet, whatever subject he touches on. But the odes of the Spanish poet have a moral grandeur far exceeding those of Horace. The spirit of present enjoyment, or indifference to futurity, which not unnaturally pervades the latter, was revolting to the warm sympathies and devout belief of Luis dc Leon. Accordingly, the ideas and images which, to the Epicurean poet, only afford inducements to devote the hours to pleasure, such as the shortness of life, the fading of flowers, or the instability of fortune, the Spanish moralist holds out as inducements to die cultivation of those higher faculties which raise the soul above this world of mutability and misfortune, and prepare it for that purer abode, which he regarded as its appointed home.

The close of the reign of Charles V. is adorned by the great name of Cervantes (1547-1616), more distinguished, however, as a prose writer than as a poet; and by the rise of the dramatic literature of Spain. For a general account of the peculiarly national and remarkable character of the Spanish theatre, which, while it is connected with our own by so many common features, has yet some striking points of distinction, which render its study peculiarly interesting to the admirers of our older British theatre, we refer to the article on the drama. Cervantes, we must admit, appears to mark its childhood ∙, for the plots of his dramas are loose, disjointed, and scarcely deserving of the name, though the gloomy grandeur of the Numantia gives it a painful fascination, like the scenes in the town of Hunger in the Inferno. Lope is identified with its boyhood; Calderon, with its maturity and perfection; Moreto, Roxas, De Solis, Mira da Mescua, Da Hoz, and others, who wrote during the reign of Philip IV., with its decline. Invention, high poetry in parts, the power of exciting and maintaining curiosity and suspense, must be accorded to the Spanish theatre. Against these must be set religious bigotry and mysticism, often painfully predominant in the plays of Calderon, particularly in those autos which the German critics have especially selected as the themes of their admiration; the affected and redundant style into which most of their poets were led by the facility of their versification, combined with the habit of working for the stage; and the practice which, upon the Spanish stage, is almost universal, of painting manners and general types of character, rather than discriminating its shades, or giving individuality to the personages represented.

We may here notice, in connection with Spanish literature, the solitary great name of which the kindred literature of Portugal has to boast, Luis de Camaens (1524- 1578), who conferred upon his countrymen that which Spain has in vain essayed to produce; for the Araucana of Ercilla certainly does not deserve the title of an epic poem. Viewed in this light, too, it must be admitted that even the Lusiadaε of Camaens is most objectionable; the action flags miserably; the mythology is ludicrous; the morality of some portions of the poem, as, for instance, the scenes on the island which Venus prepares for the refreshment of the returning Portuguese, is more than questionable; but, with all these, the work is inspired and supported by the true spirit of poetry; and its continued popularity and reputation prove how little the real charm or success of an epic depends on the mere plan or machinery of a poem. That which will always render Camaens delightful, is the tenderness of heart which overflows in such episodes as that of Ignez de Castro; and the pride and zealous endeavour with which he labours to embody in immortal verse the spirit of those days in the annals of Portugal, when learning and commerce, warlike enterprise and success, went hand in hand; when De Gama braved the terrors of the Cape, and Alvarez and Albuquerque first launched their gallies into the Atlantic.

From the seventeenth century to the present time, the literature of Spain has been one of decline. Three names only, amongst the many whose works are found quoted in Anthologies and Parnasos, deserve notice; those of Gongora (1561-1627), Quevedo (1580-1645), and Villegas (1595-1669). The real talents and rich imagination possessed by Gongora make us lament that, like Marini (from whom indeed he borrowed his manner), he applied them only to corrupt and pervert the public taste. Some of his little Anacreontic verses, songs, and letrillas, written at an earlier period of his life, are models of natural grace and felicity of expression; contrasting most painfully with the ridiculous jargon of language, and galimatias of sentiment, which he employed in his later days. The same evil tendency is visible in Quevedo. We have great invention, [7:18:164]much acuteness and comic humour, but a lamentable deficiency of feeling and taste. His works have been most justly compared by Bouterwek to a massive ornament of jewellery, in which the setting of some parts is exquisitely skilful, of others extremely rude, and in which the number of false stones and of valuable gems is nearly equal.

A purer taste occasionally appears in Villegas, the Anacreon of Spain, though he, too, seems to labour under the mania of the day, and now and then to run into extravagances worthy of the very wildest of the Cultoristos. After Villegas there appeared no Spanish poet of any originality; for the verses and the pastoral comedy of Melendez Valdez, founded on the episode of the marriage of Camacho in Don Quixote, do not rise above mediocrity; the fables of Yriarte have merely the merit of brevity and neatness of expression; and the comedies of the younger Mo-ratin, the last dramatic works which have attracted any attention, are merely ingenious imitations of Molière. At the present moment Spanish poetry would seem to be absolutely effete ; nor does there appear much reason to anticipate its speedy revival.

The present language of France has sprung from that northern dialect which was spoken in Normandy, and known by the name of the Walloon. The earliest compositions in that dialect were romances, founded on some fabulous history, such as Brut of England, which appeared about 1155. To these succeeded the romances of chivalry, from about 1130 to 1190, of which, unless the Portuguese romance of Lobeira, Palmerin of England, be supposed to have appeared before this time, it would seem the Norman-French are fairly entitled to claim the invention. Taking them as a whole, there is no disputing that much fancy and ingenuity are expended upon these now-forgotten performances, though the style is invariably flat and lumbering. They are sustained merely by the high spirit which they breathe, and the happy incidents which the chronicler occasionally introduces.

The taste for the allegorical romance was of a date somewhat posterior. Of these singular compositions, the most remarkable is the once celebrated Roman de la Rose, begun by William de Lorris, and concluded by Jean de Menn, a poem which was received with boundless admiration, and which continued for a century strongly to influence the literature of Europe. It was at once a romantic and an allegorical poem; a new edition of the art of love, adapted to the moral and metaphysical creed of the middle ages; of dreary length, and yet enlivened here and there by allegorical portraits of imaginary personages, drawn with considerable vivacity and spirit, and by those strokes of satire, or lessons of practical philosophy, which, together with the art of narration, very early began to characterize the literature of France. The conclusion, by Jean de Meun, is inferior to the commencement; it is deformed by a ribaldry and coarseness which justifies the term “niedrige polis-sonerie,” or low blackguardism, applied to it by Bouterwek.

But by far the most striking and characteristic part of the early French literature consists in that vast collection of short tales entitled Fabliaux, which were almost exclusively the production of the French provinces lying to the north of the Loire, and which are well deserving of attention, whether their own merits and originality be regarded, or their general influence on fiction. The period of their appearance extends from the last half of the twelfth, through the whole of the thirteenth and part of the fourteenth century, but the greater number are supposed to have been written during the reign of St Louis (1226 to 1270). The compositions of these minstrels differ extremely in character from those of their Provencal brethren of the south of France. The poets of Provence were generally knights and nobles; their themes love or war, or mys tical allegoric dreams; and, with much monotony, their poetry certainly presents an elevated and imposing exterior. The Trouvères were generally men of an inferior grade, sprung from the lower ranks of life, in fact literally wandering minstrels. Yet the position they occupied in society was particularly favourable to the promotion of those habits of satirical observation and comic description which constitute the chief attraction of the Fabliaux. Men, in general, of acute and vigorous minds, though destitute of learning and delicacy, and too often of principle; welcome guests in all society from their powers of amusing, yet respected in none, experiencing every extreme of life, and making themselves at home in all; sometimes helping to dispel the ennui of baronial castles, at others courting the society of the humblest vassals, they rambled over the world, harp in hand, as it were, picking up everywhere the materials of their art, and thus painting with a truth and freshness otherwise unattainable, the full-length portrait of French manners during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These light and joyous compositions turn chiefly on subjects of a familiar nature, and consist of stories of knavery and intrigue, and occasionally of those Asiatic legends with which the crusades had by this time rendered Europe familiar. Except, therefore, in invention of ingenious incidents and comic imbroglios, and in a certain tinge of humour and vivacity, which breathes of the sunny skies and vine-covered hills of France, they have little pretensions to poetry. And yet this opinion must be taken with exceptions, for they have occasionally shown that they could excel in themes of a higher kind; and the beautiful and well-known fabliau of Aucassin and Nicolette, by its tender and natural spirit, combined with the deep interest of its situations, throws into the shade the greater part of the more ambitious and elaborate chivalrous romances. We perceive in it all the romantic spirit and deep feeling of the old Spanish ballads, heightened by the graceful naiveté peculiar to the early French poetry.

The period from the commencement of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century is regarded by the French as the transition period of their poetry from infancy to maturity; and the three leading names of the period are Marot, Ronsard, and Malherbe.

Clement Marot (born 1495, died 1544) is the creator of that school of naive poetry which was afterwards carried to its perfection by La Fontaine and Voltaire. With a playful unambitious grace, he gives a happy turn to every subject, and delights to put the world in good humour with itself. It is justly observed by a French critic, Nisard, that the naiveté of Marot differs from that of any previous poet. In the older strains of the Trouvères and their successors, what we call naiveté often arises merely from the imperfection of the language, and not from any peculiarity in their turn of mind. But Marot wears this air of unconsciousness even in giving expression to ideas the most subtile and recherche; his naiveté seems independent of the language, independent almost of the ideas; it is an emanation of the peculiar genius and idiosyncrasy of the man.

It is amusing to contrast the fame of Ronsard during his life (1524-1585) with his reputation at the present moment. His own age elevated him to honours almost divine: in the present how many are acquainted even with a single page of his poems? He was considered the presiding luminary of that constellation of genius which arrogated to itself the title of the French Pleiad; whose great object it was to transplant into French the form and the manner of the lyrics of antiquity; but who succeeded only, as Boileau says, in making a jumble of everything (brouiller tout), a patchwork, in short, of Greek and Latin ideas with Italian subtilty of thought and French naiveté of expression.

“Enfin Malherbe vint,” says Boileau (1558-1628), like: Ronsard a classicist, but endeavouring, and not without [7:18:165]success, to seize rather the spirit of the ancients than their forms. Of the higher inspiration of the ode he had little; his march is stately enough, but it is measured and slow; he has little or no enthusiasm, but, in all that regarded the judicious treatment of a subject, or the minutiae of language or versification, he was well fitted to be the legislator of that new and more sober school of composition which superseded in France the extravagances of Ronsard and his satellites. The three pieces of Malherbe which appear to indicate the highest talent, approaching indeed to genius, are the Ode to Henry IV. on the taking of Sedan, the Ode to the Queen-Mother, and the beautiful verses addressed to the Councillor Duperier on the sudden death of his daughter. Few lines could be selected more beautiful than the following stanza from the latter:

Mais elle estoit du monde où les plus belles choses Ont le pire destin;

Et Rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses, L’espace d’un matin.

But she was of a world where fairest things

Have foulest doom:

Rose as she was, she had a rose’s life, A morning’s bloom.

We now arrive at the period which is, or rather was, con- . sidered by the French as the golden, age of their poetical literature, the long reign of Louis XIV. Everything at this time concurred to impress on poetry that stamp of stateliness, polish, and courtier-like adoration of monarchy, which at that time pervaded French society, and which exerted so powerful an influence on the general tastes of Europe. The French monarchy had now been consolidated by the firm hand of Richelieu, who, whilst he unrelentingly pursued his design of lowering the aristocracy and exalting the throne, was not insensible to the claims or the importance of literature, and had been the first to give it the support which a corporate character appeared likely to afford, by the formation of the celebrated academy. The troubles of the Fronde were over. The heats and animosities of rival religions had been appeased by the edict of Nantes. The personal character of Louis was well suited to effect his main object, which was to render his court a model for the imitation of the world. Of limited abilities, without talent either for warfare or diplomacy, he possessed tact enough to perceive at once his deficiencies and his advantages; and, endowed with many of the most attractive outward graces and accomplishments of a king, he played the part of a dignified monarch with much discretion and ability. Thus wielding, without’ opposition, the energies of a powerful kingdom, and collecting around him at his court all that France contained of intellectual ability, a tone of courtly polish and extreme refinement was imparted to society, which soon impressed its traces upon literature, 'partly for good, and partly for evil. The influence exercised by French manners and French literature upon other countries became paramount and unprecedented, superseding the most inveterate usages, overturning the strongest national prejudices, and establishing a despotism more universal than had been known in literature since the downfall of Greece and Rome.

The most imposing shape in which poetry appears during this supposed Augustan period of French literature, is in that of the drama; which, commencing with the rude plays of Jodelle (who died in 1560), reached its perfection during the close of the reign of Louis XIII. and the reign of Louis XIV., in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the exquisite comedies of Molière. For a full account of the French stage we refer to the article Drama.

It cannot be said that, in any other department of poetry except that of the drama, the age of Louis XIV. was preeminently distinguished; for the artificial and hollow refinement of the time seemed unfavourable to that vigorous and natural feeling which should speak in poetry, with a corre sponding strength and originality of expression. Yet two names impress themselves, by their strongly discriminated traits, upon the memory,—La Fontaine (1621-1695) as the reviver of the old naive style of Marot, though with a degree of polish and grace of which Marot had no conception; and Boileau, as the representative of that school of terse morality, sound sense, and wit, mingled with and heightened by fancy, of which Pope is the best example in English poetry.

With all the levity and licentiousness which deform the Contes, there is no denying to La Fontaine many of the best qualities of the poet; knowledge of the world, which yet does not impair his bonhommie and kindness of heart; a humour playful, gentle, continuous, never pushed to excess, combined with tenderness, with a disposition to reverie and pensiveness; a strong sensibility to the beauties of the country, of which his descriptions, though short, are always striking, and marked by that just selection of points and clear local portraiture which we find in Crabbe, and which show that he made his studies for them on the spot; the whole heightened and set off by a style apparently simplicity itself, but which must have been, as we know it was, the result of the most laborious polishing and elimination: all these give an extreme charm to the Contes, and perhaps still more to the Fables, of La Fontaine; for the Contes, though their licentious gaiety has made them more generally known, display to less advantage the peculiar qualities of La Fontaine’s genius.

Boileau, again (1636-1711), pleases and must always please, although by qualities the most opposite to those of La Fontaine; namely, by awakening a calm emotion of intellectual satisfaction, rather than by any excitement of the imagination or the feelings. As Racine represents the tender and voluptuous side of French manners and character during the age of Louis XIV.; as La Fontaine embodies in his tales and fables its easy tone of moral indifference and malice, masking itself under the disguise of simplicity; so in Boileau we find, arrayed in a dignified and philosophical dress, its better points, its good sense and sagacity, its lively perception of the eccentric and ridiculous, its love of external decency, order, and propriety, both in morality and in literature.

In his Lutrin he even displays a considerable degree of invention, though chiefly of a comic kind; for, though not destitute of a sense and feeling of high poetry, he was essentially deficient in any actual power of dealing with such themes; and, with that tact and judgment which distinguished him, he has rarely, save in his most unfortunate Ode on the taking of Namur, which has been so justly but so unmercifully parodied by Prior, ventured within this province of poetry. Within his proper field of moral censorship, or of the mock heroic, arrayed in all the graces of elegant diction and classic allusion,—or the poetical abridgment, in the most condensed and pointed form of the approved critical canons of the time,—he is assuredly without a rival in French poetry, and, with the exception of Pope, in European literature.

The literature of the eighteenth century in France is more distinguished by its prose than its poetry. Prior to Voltaire, at least, in whom great and versatile powers of mind, approaching if not attaining to high genius, must be admitted, it added nothing of substantial value to the contributions of the age of Louis XIV. At one time indeed the odes of J. B. Rousseau (1669-1741) were extolled to the skies, as models of lyric poetry; and Voltaire certainly speaks of them in terms of extravagant praise. To any one now perusing them, with the recollection of the great models of antiquity before him, or even testing them by the simpler process of his own feelings, they will assuredly appear totally deficient in genuine inspiration. The enthusiasm is imitative and factitious; the imitation dexterous, no doubt, but yet palpable to every one who possesses any real poetical sensibility; the thought is often propped up.
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by the words, not the words elevated and quickened unconsciously by the vital grandeur of the thought. What true lyric enthusiasm, indeed, could reside in a mind which busied itself alternately in the composition of rapturous religious odes, and epigrams of disgusting obscenity?

Much more of real poetry, because accompanied by nature and simplicity, is to be found in Chaulieu’s pastoral lyrics; in some of the little romances of Moncrif, such as Alexis and Alix, which abounds with lines that by their truth and simplicity of expression have become proverbial; or in Gresset’s pleasing stanzas on the golden age, or even in his lively tale of Vert-Vert.

The reputation of Voltaire (1694-1778) at the present day rests more upon his witty and amusing prose than upon his poetry. That didactic tendency which was the spirit of the age, that attempt to make all the creations of poetry subservient to inculcating certain philosophical opinions, appears in all the poetry of Voltaire; it speaks even in Mahomet and in Zane, as much as in his graceful occasional verses, his Tales in the manner of La Fontaine, or his epistles. “Les François nont pas la tête Epique,” was his own expression; and the Henriade certainly went far to prove the fact. It is the mere simulacrum of an epic; hard, laboured, soulless. It is most unfortunate for Voltaire, that the poem in which his versatile abilities have been displayed to the greatest advantage, is one which its indecencies and impieties have in a great measure banished beyond the pale of literature.

About 1770 may be noticed the rise of the descriptive school of poetry, in the poems of St Lambert and Delille; an importation in all probability from England, where a similar taste had been introduced by the success of the Seasons of Thomson. From 1730 to the commencement of the present century, numerous attempts were also made to confer on France something that should merit the title of an epic poem; but without the slightest success.

During the despotism of Napoleon, poetry appeared to be almost silent. With the restoration of the Bourbons appears the rise of that romantic school, the growth of the fermentation of the revolution, and “of that removal of the old landmarks both in polity and opinions which it caused; a school which, both in theory and practice, repudiates the principles of the old French classicists, and has certainly effected a complete revolution in the literary tastes of the time. Whether much or anything has been gained by the change, is in the highest degree questionable. Calm observers think the French have injudiciously sacrificed their reputation for correct and classic execution, for wit and good sense, in the search after those higher qualities of lyrical inspiration or epic grandeur which nature appears to have denied to them. We do not speak of the revolting extravagances in which the leaders of the romantic school, at the head of whom stands Victor Hugo, have indulged. The public taste of Europe, and latterly of France, has so strongly revolted against this convulsionary school, that it cannot long maintain any hold over the national mind; but we fear that, even when the worst extravagances of the new school are retrenched, there will remain a permanent injury to the national taste, in the loose, disjointed, and barbarous style, with the total want of all logical plan in composition, which these innovators have introduced.

Yet it is pleasing to close this short notice of French poetry with the name of one who, though partaking of all the modern influences of his time, is yet within his own department, that of song, a genuine classic. In this department of the lyric, France has always been distinguished. In that country not only has it constituted, as elsewhere, the amusement of the lower classes, but it has long attained the dignity of a powerful political agent; its monarchy was justly described by Champfort as a despotism tempered by songs. Of all the modes in which poetry can be made subservient to purposes like these, song is the most effective, universal, and immediate in its operation. It speaks not to a particular class, but to all; its brevity fixes it in the memory; the creature of the moment, it avails itself of every allusion, every passion, every prejudice of the day; while its outward form appears so trivial and harmless, that even despotic governments are deterred, by the fear of ridicule, from attempting to interfere with it. Beranger, whilst he selects the simplest, the most universal feelings, the most familiar sentiments and images, provided they are true, unforced, and natural, yet, by the tact and skill which he employs in their treatment, and the felicity of their expression, invests them with quite an original character. The oftener a thought has occurred to others, so much the better with him; for it is an evidence of its truth, and of its power of affecting the heart. What remains for him, and what he performs, is to impart to this thought, so familiar to all, though perhaps vaguely and indefinitely, form, colour, expression, so that when presented by him to our notice, it is felt at once to be an old acquaintance, and yet awakens all the curiosity and interest with which we regard a new one. His originality, in short, lies entirely in his application of the idea, and the point and compactness with which the image is brought out by his hands, ∏is success in these respects is great; but it is a success attained, as may be imagined, by the most patient revision. He is said to be an extremely slow composer, frequently laying aside the subject on which he is employed for weeks, and patiently waiting, till, by dint of long reflection on the subject, and careful polishing, by the selection of the happiest allusions, by the studious elimination of every phrase or illustration that appears recherche or ornate, he has given to the whole that unity and appearance of ease and simplicity at which he constantly aims.

We have noticed the early development of German heroic song in the Nebelungen and the Heldenbuch; and the introduction of the Provençal taste under the Suabian emperors in the poetry of the Minnesingers. In all its leading features the poetry of this period (1138 to 1346) corresponds with that of the French Troubadours, with this unfavourable distinction, that the poetry of the Minnesingers (love-singers) is much more exclusively devoted to amatory themes than that of the Provençals, which blended with these, warlike and patriotic or satirical effusions. Hence their monotony of effect, when we peruse any of these collections at once, is undeniable. Schiller has, accordingly, in a passage of unusual severity, denounced their poverty of ideas, and says, that if the sparrows were to compose an “almanack of love and friendship,” it would probably bear a close resemblance to these cloying strains of the Minnesingers. But against this sarcastic remark must be placed the observations of Frederick Schlegel. “The impression of uniformity arises from our seeing these poems bound together into large collections, a fate which was probably neither the design nor the hope of those who composed them. But, in truth, not only love-songs, but all lyrical poems, if they are really true to nature, and aim at nothing more than the expression of individual feelings, must necessarily be confined within a very narrow range both of thought and sentiment. The truth is, that great variety in lyrical poetry is never to be found, except in those ages of imitation when men are fond of treating of all manner of subjects in all manner of forms. Then, indeed, we often find the tone and taste of twenty different ages and nations brought together within the same collection, and observe that the popularity of the poet is increased exactly in proportion as he descends from his proper dignity, when simplicity is sacrificed to conceits and epigrams, and the ode sinks into an occasional copy of verses.” [7:18:167]The opening of German poetry, then, had been, on the whole, brilliant and promising; but the confusion, insecurity, and violence, which followed the death of Frederick II. in 1250, seemed fatal to the progress of improvement. After Rudolph of Hapsburg, we perceive in its poetry a visible decline. The Minnesingers were succeeded by the Mastersingers, personages who seemed to think poetry was to be acquired like any other traue, and to be supported and kept alive by guilds and corporations. It is difficult, perhaps, to point out at what precise period the former school of poetry ends, and the latter begins; they melt into each other like the colours of the rainbow. But the character of the two schools, taken in the mass, is very different: for, in place of the tender, thrilling, amatory spirit of the Minnesingers, the great object of the poetical craftsmen who succeeded them was to give a didactic and philosophical air to their compositions, and to substitute for fancy and feeling, common-place truisms and moral aphorisms. One work only of this period deserves notice, not indeed on account of its high poetry, but of its shrewdness, its effective satire, and its invention, the comic epic, as it may be called, of Reynard the Fox, the groundwork of which, no doubt, existed before in other countries; but the novelty of the treatment of the subject by the German or Frisiae writer, and the great superiority of its execution, entitle it to the character of an original work.

From the close of the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, a dreary blank intervenes in the poetical annals of Germany. Bouterwek has, indeed, devoted more than a volume of his valuable work to this period; but, whatever interest the minute detail of second-rate names may have for Germans, there is certainly little or nothing calculated to awaken the least interest in the foreign reader. The effects of the thirty years’ war were felt in Germany, paralyzing science, general culture, and the spirit of poetry, up to the time of the peace of Westphalia. Opitz and Flemming are the only poets who rise above the dead-level of the mediccrity of the time. Opitz was a great importer from Other countries, many of his poetical consignments being derived from Holland. Yet, though not a man of original mind, his strong good sense, a sincere honesty of mind, and a patriotic inspiration, render his poetry even now readable; though probably few are disposed to concur with F. Schlegel in preferring his style to that of Klopstock. Flemming is an inferior poet to Opitz, and yet perhaps his poetry is more interesting, precisely because it is more personal; because it lets us into the secret of his feelings, his friendships, and attachments. Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein enjoy the evil distinction of having corrupted, by the most false and fantastic taste, that poetry which was already but too destitute of any great pretensions. The period from 1648 to nearly 1750 is characterized by Schlegel as the age of barbarism, a chaotic interregnum in the history of German literature. Poetry existed in no other shape than that of feeble imitations of the French, profuse of mythology, penurious of feeling, destitute of nationality. “Apollo,” says Menzel, “sat on the German Parnassus in a full-bottomed peruke, and, with fiddle in hand, led the concert of the well-powdered muses.”

When at last the German muse began to arouse herself from her torpor, and to “awake a louder and a loftier strain,” she received no countenance from royal patronage. The great Frederick despised and disliked the literature of his countrymen, and seemed to think there was no hope for poetry, save in a slavish adherence to the spirit and the rules of the French. If Klopstock (1708-1803) had done nothing more than awaken the feeling of nationality by his poetry, and teach his countrymen that, in the free and independent cultivation of their own genius, and the selection of their own themes, lay their only chance of re deeming Germany from the state of torpor into which its poetry had fallen, he would have conferred an inestimable service on its literature. With the Messiah, Schlegel thinks the modem poetry of Germany may be said to have begun, so great have been the benefits which it has conferred in regard to style and expression, as well as in the spirit of nationality and religious feeling which it imparted to the poetry by which it was succeeded. The plan, indeed, labours under great and insuperable defects. The mind of Klopstock was but ill suited to the epic; it was eminently lyrical and elegiac. Nor can it be denied that there is a degree of rhetorical pomp and long-windedness about his style, which becomes frequently oppressive, and communicates an air of pedantry to his poem. Still Klopstock has exercised an important and beneficent influence upon German literature; he taught his country its own strength, and freed it at once and for ever from the leading-strings of foreign authority.

Wieland (1733-1813) is more French in character than Klopstock, or rather he blends the luxurious and somewhat licentious spirit of the Italian romantic poets, with that tone of gay and heartless philosophy which the example of Voltaire had introduced into French literature; and yet, withal, he is no mere imitator, but possesses a decided individuality in his later and better works, and even a truly German spirit. The tendency towards the imitation of the French appears, however, chiefly in the earlier productions of his romantic muse, such as the Idris and Zenide, the New Amadis, and others, in which he has assailed with such persevering satire the Platonism of love. As he advanced in life, he began to entertain better views: he grew dissatisfied with that epicurism which he had inculcated as the basis of conduct, and that licentious gaiety which he had made the mainspring of his poetry; and in his Oberon he endeavoured to make amends for the levity with which he had treated the better feelings of the heart, by those charming pictures of conjugal love, true constancy, and chivalrous heroism, which, combined with the beauty of the descriptions, and the pure and simple flow of the style, have rendered the Oberon the only successful effort in later times to revive the tones of that Italian harp which has slumbered since the days of Ariosto.

Gessner( 1738-1788) belongs to thisperiod. His Eclogues at one time enjoyed great popularity; and he has certainly in some of them, such as the First Navigation, displayed fancy and invention. But he deals in a species of poetry too remote from actual life; and there is a sort of sheepish modesty about his shepherds, and French coquetry about his nymphs and shepherdesses, which communicate something of a ludicrous character to his Arcadia.

The fame of Lessing (1721-1781) must rest more upon his vigorous, transparent, logical, and delightful prose style, than upon his poetry. His dramas, with the exception of Nathan the Wise, are written in prose; and the style of Nathan scarcely rises above the conversational pitch, though its Brahmin-like simplicity of tone, and the air of mild and tolerant wisdom which pervades it, leave a pleasing impression on the memory.

The two greatest names in German literature succeed, namely, Schiller (1759-1805) and Goethe (1749-1832). Of their dramas we have spoken elsewhere. Schiller, however, though greatest as a dramatist, is entitled to nearly equal eminence as a lyric poet. His odes, his short poems, mingling so much philosophy with so much feeling; his charming ballads, pitched on every key, from the simplicity of the Toggenhurg and the Fridolin, to the rude fort* of the Diver, the fine chivalrous and devotional tone of the fight with the dragon, and the classic finish of the complaint of Ceres, or the cranes of Ibycus; would alone have been sufficient to place him second only to Goethe, had he never written William Tell, or the Maid of Orleans, oς [7:18:168]Wallenstein. In one particular he must rank far higher than Goethe; in the elevated aim which he always had in view; the attainment of noble ends by noble means; the rendering poetry what it always ought to be, not a mere specimen of plastic ingenuity, but something by which the soul feels itself refined and the heart made better. His enthusiasm, impetuous, and yet tender and affectionate, clothed all the universe, moral and material, with forms of grandeur, and gave to all he uttered the stamp of purity and truth. “His greatest faculty,” says the most eloquent of his biographers, “was a half poetical, half philosophical imagination, a faculty teeming with magnificence and brilliancy; now adorning or aiding to erect a stately pyramid of scientific speculation, now brooding over the abysses of thought and feeling, till thoughts and feelings else unutterable were embodied in expressive forms, and palaces and landscapes, glowing in ethereal beauty, rose like exhalations from the bosom of the deep.”

Of Goethe we have already so very fully expressed our opinion (see the article Goethe), that we shall not again enter upon the subject.

At the present day the aspect of German poetry is not the most imposing. Tiek, who had evinced high talent for the Mährchen, or Legendary Tale, to which he communicated all the charm of earnest belief, and the most musical versification, has for some time past exchanged poetry for prose and polemical discussion. Uhland and Ruckert are at this moment tho most eminent among the German lyric poets; for the effusions of Heine, wretched attempts to infuse a sneering imitation of Byronism into lyric poetry, have already, we believe, survived their popularity. The host of poets, besides these, is numerous, but not of any marked excellence or originality. Judging from a few of his compositions, we should be disposed to say there was more of poetical genius in Leopold Schefer, than in almost any of his contemporaries.

It is not our intention to enter into any minute details as to English poetry, with which we shall conclude the present sketch. Since we have already noticed, under separate heads, most of the individuals by whom it was adorned, we shall merely attempt to indicate generally the directions taken by poetical taste at different periods of our annals.

Even prior to the Norman conquest, we know from William of Malmesbury, that England, like all the Gothic nations, had been possessed by a large mass of ballads, written in Anglo-Saxon, though, as no fragments of these remain, we know nothing of their poetical merit. This earlier minstrelsy must soon have sunk into discredit, or been entirely suppressed, by the Norman conquest.

The English language, as it now exists, grew out of the mixture of the Anglo-Saxon with the Norman, and seems to have acquired a complete form by the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1297, we have the Rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, the first undoubted composition in the English tongue.

From the Norman conquest to the time of Edward HL, the literature and poetry of England consists of little else than translations from, or imitations of, the Norman romances and chronicles; and, judging from the ridicule with which they have been assailed by Chaucer in his Rhyme of Sir Thopas, they must have been of slender merit, since they are represented as shocking the taste, of course not particularly refined, of the host of the Tabard. The distance, at all events, which separates all our English versifiers of this period from Chaucer (born 1328, died 1406), is such as justly to entitle him to the honour of being the first of English poets, the sun that “flames in the forehead of the modem sky ;” throwing out a splendour that showed at once his own lustre, and the dreary wastes that spread far and wide towards the literary horizon.

Much of Chaucers time, however, was wasted in the school of those French allegorical poets, whose romances were at one time so influential in Europe. In fact, nearly half his life, as Mr Campbell remarks, was passed amongst the dreams, emblems, flower-worshippings, and courts and parliaments of love, of that visionary and tiresome school. He was fifty-four years of age before he commenced the Canterbury Tales, in which alone the peculiarities of his genius, its originality, and its extent, can be said to be completely manifested. This late discovery of the true bent of his powers is singular; for Chaucer appears peculiarly marked out as the poet, not of mysticism and allegory, but of clear observation of life, and of practical aims. In the Canterbury Tales, which were obviously suggested by the influence of Boccacio’s Decameron, he first found full scope for the display of the various qualities of his mind, and of that mass of real knowledge of life with which his experience of society, in all its aspects, high and low, from the palace to the cottage, at home and abroad, had supplied his mind. His clear observation, and corresponding power of clear painting, giving the most vivid picturesqueness to all his delineations; his quiet and unobtrusive humour; his satirical power, at once forcible and delicate (a combination peculiarly rare in that stage of struggling and imperfect civilization); his imagination sufficiently elevated, yet always regulated by good sense; a cheerful contented tone of feeling, which makes him impartial towards all the world; a power either of creating character, or of so artfully and harmoniously putting together the result of his actual studies of men, as to give to these all the free and natural effect of a creation; all these qualities found fit scope for their exercise in the broad, varied canvass he selected, which, by means of its ingenious framework, of a pilgrimage embracing persons of both sexes and of all ranks, and enlivened by tales told to relieve the tedium of the way, admitted equally of the comic and the tragic, the high and low; themes of chivalry and mythology, like the Knight’s Tale; tales of wonder, blending oriental marvels with the romance of the West, like the Squire’s; or stories of English low life, like the Miller’s or the Reve’s. The versatility of talent, indeed, displayed in the Canterbury Tales is astonishing; and, as in the case of his Italian rival, Boccacio, it is difficult to say whether it is in the comic or the tragic that Chaucer most excels.

In invention, so far as regards incident, the English poet and the Italian novelist may be placed nearly on a par; the woodland freshness and beauty of Chaucer’s forest scenes, may be equalled by the charming country landscapes in which Boccacio places his interlocutors; but in power of characteristic delineation, particularly by those minute strokes of Dutch painting which present the exterior of objects, or those happily selected traits which at once mark the individual, Boccacio cannot sustain the least comparison with the father of English poetry. He has many faults, but they are the faults of his age; the faults of coarseness of taste and manners, of inartificial plans, of prolixity of style; the natural errors to which the infancy of poetry, destitute of models, and struggling with an unformed language, was exposed. Against these must be placed the advantages of a vocabulary in which words are pictures, of subjects of description, unhackneyed, and bright with all their primitive freshness; the wisdom or grave humour of the philosophic observer blending most cunningly with the bonhommie and the garrulous graces of the narrator; an easy abandon, both as to matter and manner, which has its charm, however little reconcileable with the more artificial treatment which criticism would suggest; nature painted without exaggeration, as without disguise; and withal that feeling of unity imparted to the whole, which makes the most discordant elements unite in kindly harmony, and [7:18:169]which is never found except in the productions of the highest minds.

The appearance of Chaucer in English poetry has been well compared by Warton to the early appearance of a bright and genial day in an English spring; exciting the brighter hopes of a speedy and balmy summer,—hopes which are almost immediately blasted by the return of frost and tempest, and the settling down of winter, as bleak and blighting as before. In English poetry that effect was produced by the disastrous period of the wars of the Roses.

From the time of Chaucer almost to that of Spenser, certainly no progress is made; or rather, if the language in some degree advances, the spirit of poetry retrogrades. Gower was his contemporary, Lydgate followed immediately after him; but they belong, so far as regards poetical genius, nay even poetical dexterity, to a previous century. In truth, the first introduction of learning into England appears to have been unfavourable to poetry, giving rise to pedantic imitation in place of independent efforts of genius; a tendency which, indeed, to some extent, is visible even in the finest poetry of the Elizabethan period. By far the most distinguished name, indeed, between Chaucer and Spenser, is that of the Scottish poet Dunbar, who, in humour and power of character-painting, greatly surpasses Gower, and approaches to Chaucer. The poems of Surrey, and Wyatt, and Sackville, who followed during the reign of Henry VIII., can be regarded only as proofs that the love of poetry had not ceased to exist, and that in some shape, however rude, its voice was struggling to make itself heard in that calmer and more settled state of the politicaI atmosphere which had followed the union of the rival houses in the persons of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York.

But when Spenser arose to enrich English literature with another great work of original genius, many causes, which had probably at first acted unfavourably for the progress of poetry, w ere beginning to exercise a more salutary operation. The Reformation, which had at first produced tumult, bloodshed, and wide-extended distress, by the suppression of those great hospitals, the monasteries, was now beginning to bring forth its better fruits, in the shape of a free and inquiring spirit, carried into all departments of thought and imagination. That acquaintance with the treasures of ancient learning, or the classic poetry of modern Italy, which had at first tended to overpower and confuse the national mind, was now turned to better account; it had insensibly refined the taste, and made the purest models of preceding times familiar to the poet and the scholar. The spirit of chivalry, still lingering in the English character, had been aroused into new and active existence by the triumphs which had attended the national arms during the reign of Elizabeth. A love of adventure had been generated by the frequent expeditions into remote countries and climes, as to which, in that imperfect state of geographical and physical knowledge, marvels were believed, as incredible as any that figure in the pages of Sir John Mandeville. There was, in short, at this period, a remarkable union, in the English character, of the sober qualities of strong intellect with deep convictions and high imagination; a character which manifests itself in every department both of poetry and literature.

Born in this happy period, and educated under such influences, Spenser (1510-1598) produced his grest poem of the Fairy Queen. Familiar with Italian literature, as well as with the best learning of antiquity, it was from the works of Ariosto and Tasso that he had derived his bent towards chivalrous poetry. But the deeper earnestness of his character prevented him from treating his subject with the levity of Ariosto. Chivalry was to him a principle of faith, a part of religion, not the mere fantastic framework in which successive pageants of love and war, or luxurious description, were to be enclosed. In England it had not assumed that outworn and almost comic air which it wore when Ariosto first took up the entangled threads of Boiardo. It had still a vital influence on society, and ran like a thread of silver tissue through the coarser web of life. Nay, even the religious spirit in which Tasso had conceived the Jerusalem, scarcely satisfied the mind of Spenser. He would render every incident which he described a step in some high argument or moral demonstration; every character the embodied representation of some virtue and vice; all the visions of imagination subservient to the cause of religion. He would enlist all the restless and excursive intellect, and adventurous feelings of an ardent and romantic age, under the banner of purity and goodness.

That with the glory of so goodly sight, The hearts of men that fondly here desire Faire seeming shews, and feed on vain delight, Transported with celestial desire

Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher, And learn to love, with zealous humble duty, Th’ eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.

And so deeply does this principle pervade his poems, that, whilst wandering among the scenes of enchantment with which he surrounds us in that spiritual region to which he gives the name of Fairy Land, we can never forget that they have a spell beyond their first outward significance, nor be insensible to that still small voice of piety and wisdom, which speaks through all those creations of his genius, and whispers that the place whereon we are standing is holy ground.

It must be admitted, however, that if this under-current of allegory gives a degree of solemnity and moral grandeur to Spenser’s poem, its effects in other respects are unfavourable. It does occasionally interfere with the natural movements of the imagination, gives a formal and metaphysical air to the conceptions of the poet, and, by rendering the characters abstractions of moral qualities, impairs their individuality as human beings. So far the injurious effect of Spenser’s allegorical plan can hardly be denied; but it is absurd to speak of the allegory in Spenser, being so obtrusive and continuous as altogether to destroy the interest of the poem as a representation of romantic life. The fact is quite different. Occasionally, no doubt, in the personifications of Envy or Pride, or the siege of the Castle of Temperance, in which the barriers of hearing, sense, smell, taste, and touch are represented as successively assailed by troops of monsters from without, the allegory is too prominent; but assuredly it sinks entirely out of view, and is perceived only on subsequent reflection, in the deep human interest of all the finer passages of the poem, such as the remorse of the Red Cross Knight, his temptation by Despair; the wanderings of Una, with her angel face ·“making a sunshine in the shady place ;” Guyon’s visit to the cave of Mammon, and his trial in the gardens of Acrasia; the combat of Campbel with the three brothers; or the many other passages, which must be impressed upon the memory of every reader.

An extreme sensibility, almost amounting to a luxurious love of beauty, a flush of colour in his descriptions, which has led Mr Campbell to compare him to Rubens, and a fancy of the most remarkable exuberance, are the leading qualities of Spenser’s mind. In this prodigality of fancy, indeed, lies at once the strength and the weakness of Spenser: for while it infuses life into all his pictures, making the plumes of Prince Arthur wave like the almondtree on the top of Selinis; or the face of Britomart, when she raises her vizor, like the moon breaking forth in darksome night from behind the noisome cloud in which she was enveloped; so, on the other hand, it leads him occasionally to revel in images and traits which are painful, or even physically revolting, such as the portrait of Gluttony, [7:18:170]the loathsome vomit of Envy, or the minute description of the operation of Diet and Appetite, Concoction and Digestion, with some other inmates of Castle Temperance. His fancy may indeed be compared to the Nile in its overflow, disdaining the confinement of banks, and spreading around a luxuriance of soil, alike productive of the flower and the weed.

In the portraiture of the allegorical beings introduced, Spenser is admitted to be without a rival. In his hand they almost cease to be mere abstractions of good and evil qualities, so life-like is the form in which they are presented, so picturesque the garb and accompaniments with which they are invested, so natural the gestures, actions, and occupations, attributed to them. They appear the natural inhabitants of this realm of enchantment, raised as it is many degrees above the level of reality, bright in the near ground, with the sunniest tints of fancy, and fading away in the distance into the most aerial and heavenly hues.

The language of Spenser seems to be steeped in music; he is the greatest master of the difficult art of employing alliteration with success; his versification unites in the highest degree melody with majesty. It is formed on the principle of the Italian ottava rima ; but, by the addition of the Alexandrine, it possesses a sonorous grandeur in the close which the Italian stanza wants. “It has not,” says Mr Hazlitt, “the bold dramatic transitions of Shakspeare’s blank verse, nor the high varied tone of Milton’s; but it is the perfection of harmony, dissolving the soul in pleasure, or holding it captive in the chains of suspense. Spenser is the poet of our waking dreams; and he invented not only a language, but a music of his own for them. The modulations are infinite, like those of the waves of the sea; but the effect is still the same, lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of all the jarring noises of the world.”

In the hands of Spenser, the allegorical form appears invested with all the brightest colours of the fancy. In the works of most of his contemporaries it appears lifeless and pedantic. A disagreeable mixture of stilted expression and false learning blends with and alloys most of the poetry of the time. It deforms the otherwise noble lines of Sir John Davies, and renders Silvester unreadable. Shakspeare is not free from it; for it was deeply inwoven with the national taste of the time, and showed itself in the language of ordinary conversation no less than in poetry. Yet it is delightful to find the greatest dramatist also the greatest lyrical poet of his age; for, after Spenser, what work of that time will bear the least comparison with Shakspeare’s sonnets? Sonnets they are not, in the strict Italian sense; but for condensation of imagery, for natural thoughts, clothing themselves in the aptest expressions either of majesty or melody, without any redundance of expletives, or rank luxuriance of epithets, they leave Petrarch and his imitators at a distance. A singular grace, and even dreamy beauty, surprises us in the masques of Ben Jonson; because it contrasts so strangely with the otherwise hard and saturnine turn of his mind. A few gems, amidst much that is coarse or quaint or indifferent, may be gleaned from the pages of Herrick; power and vigour, mixed with sectarian gloom, and deformed by extreme ruggedness of versification, are visible in Quarles. The rise of satire appears in the works of Hall and Donne, of pastoral in Browne; while sacred poetry finds no unworthy representatives in Giles Fletcher and Crashaw. A lighter and gayer taste, a more level, but natural expression, shows itself in the compositions of the cavalier poets of the court of Charles I., in the graceful little airs and verses of Carew, Lovelace, Davenant, and Suckling. In particular, to them we are indebted for some of the best of the few good songs we possess in English; witness the “He that loves a rosy cheek” of Carew, and the song written by Lovelace during his confinement in Westminster, “When love with unconfined wings hovers within my gates.” To Denham and Waller, particularly the latter, have been ascribed by Johnson the glory of improving our English numbers. It would be more just to say, that they had the good sense to perceive the importance of this element of poetry, as Spenser had done, while their contemporaries too much neglected it. Almost all the poets above mentioned have been classed by Johnson under the title of the metaphysical poets; a title of doubtful application as to any of them, but which, if it be applicable to Cowley, whom he considers their chief, can scarcely be very accurate when applied to Suckling and Waller. Cowley is simply a poet in whom the fancy, while it is teeming and fertile, is seldom warmed by passion or directed by judgment; whose miscellaneous learning oppresses and buries his taste; and who therefore wearies us even at the moment he impresses us with the consciousness of his great resources and his mental powers.

A great change in the character and spirit of poetry followed the convulsions which closed abruptly the reign of the first Charles. The poetry of that court leant towards the elegant, the romantic, the fanciful, the brilliant, and witty; but the stronger passions which had been awakened, the deeper interests which had been put in hazard, by the civil war, had soon impressed a character of solemnity on all literature, and made poetry itself, following the fashion of the time, assume a polemical, ascetic, sometimes mystical, yet grand and enthusiastic character. In those whose tastes were formed only after the change, this polemical character, and this proscription of certain subjects or associations, to which puritanism led, would probably have damped the wing and narrowed the flight of imagination; and accordingly no great poet appears to have been reared in that rigid and prosaic school. But the tastes of Milton, the great poet of this period, had all been formed in an age and a school more favourable to the exercise of the imaginative powers; his exquisite lyrics, and his Cornus, had already been written before he visited Italy in 1638, at the very time when Carew, and Suckling, and Da-venaut were in the height of their popularity and reputation. Ere his great epic poem appeared, he had witnessed and deeply shared in the agitating struggle which had ended in the temporary subversion of the monarchy, and the stern but imposing despotism of Cromwell; and thus educated in the former period, and as yet witnessing the best bloom and flush of the latter, he united the chivalrous recollections of the Elizabethan age, and the classic associations with which his early education had filled his mind, with the enthusiasm of principle and intensity of will which characterised the men of the Parliament. Milton represents more vividly than any other the wide sweep and overpowering force of those political and religious sentiments which agitated the age; for all his earlier leanings were visibly directed towards the romantic and gorgeous associations of the past, towards the pride and pomp of chivalry, the well-trod stage, the throngs of knights and barons bold, the stateliness of feudal castles, the solemnity of minsters, the pomp of tournaments, the peal of organs, and the dim religious light of painted windows. Such was the poet of Lycidas, of Cornus, of the Allegro, and the Penseroso, the two most perfect gems of contemplative lyric poetry of which Britain has to boast; and yet we see these tastes abandoned or repressed as he advances in life and in party spirit, till at last he views them only as unnatural corruptions of primitive liberty and simplicity. Still, with Milton, though a taint of bigotry pervades his views, everything is pure, high minded, and disinterested. “Nought he does in hate, but all in honour.” He stands at an immense distance from the sect to whom he had allied himself, but with [7:18:171]whom, after all, he had little in common. In no one does poetry more conspicuously appear a part of religion. He regards it as a sacred trust, not to be sacrificed on the altar of vanity, not to be purchased for a price, not to be applied to any unworthy or even trifling end.

Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt, And in clear dream and solemn vision Telling of things which no gross ear can hear; Till oft converse with heavenly habitants Begin to cast a beam on the outer shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turn it by degrees to the soul’s essence, Till all be made immortal.

It would be absurd, at the present day, to enter on any formal criticism of his great work of Paradise Lost, the most original, if not the most successful, of modern epics. About no poem perhaps are opinions more agreed; every one feels its sustained loftiness, combined with so much of tenderness, in the scenes of Eden, but always suggesting the idea of effort and labour,—the wonderful art with which learning itself is rendered poetical in his hands; for even the visions of mythology, and the fantastical traditions of chivalry, are made to heighten the effect of a sacred poem dealing with the mystery of the fall of man ;—and, lastly, the consummate artifice of the versificat'on, which, as Hazlitt remarks, seems to float up and down, as if on wings.

Milton represents the more imposing side of the Puritans, and he is almost the solitary poet of whom they can boast. The other side of their character, their hypocrisy, and their narrow and coarse tastes, are exposed in the merciless and consummately clever Hudibras of Butler. The poem is now, no doubt, in a great measure obsolete, like every application of poetry to the exposure of the peculiarities or vices of a particular age; yet its masculine vigour, its condensation of thought, and its wit, entitle Butler to a very high rank among the broad humourists of poetry.

From the oppressive wit and subtilty of Cowley and his fellows, it is delightful to turn to the manliness, the common sense, the “long-resounding march and energy divine,” of Dryden, who marks the point of transition from the metaphysical poetry to the critical. He had himself in youth been strongly influenced by the pervading taste for conceit; and it must be admitted, that in the greater part of his dramatic writings this taint clings to him to the last. As a dramatist, indeed, we can admire in him nothing but the nerve and vigour of his dialogue, and that power of reasoning in verse in which he so much excelled. But in his other works, such as the Absalom and Achitophel, he threw aside this rage for conceits, he was natural, transparent, vigorous; his illustrations, instead of being sought for, as in the case of Cowley, on account of their remoteness and apparent inaptitude, are such as at once adorn and elucidate, and are felt to be close and familiar without being common. High imagination he did not possess, and for his purpose it was scarcely needed. He has, in fact, scarcely written a line which is pathetic, and few that can be considered sublime. Yet in fancy he was not deficient, for it supplies him with inexhaustible imagery; his Ode shows that he could be raised at times into a true lyrical enthusiasm, whilst his judgment rarely fails him, except, indeed, in those bombastic plays, which he had framed by jumbling together an imbroglio of two inconsistent models, the French school, from which he borrowed his rhymes and his affectation of sentiment; and the Spanish, to which he was indebted for the exaggeration of his passionate scenes, and the complexity of his plots. Had he known nothing of these, and been left to form him self on the model of Spenser and Milton and .Shakspeare, and in a less artificial state of society, he might at least have avoided the gross want of nature evinced in these rhyming plays, though we can hardly persuade ourselves that, by any process of tuition, he could ever have become a great dramatist. “The general soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution, his information of vast superficies though of small volume, his wit scarcely inferior to that of the most distinguished followers of Donne, his eloquence grave, deliberative, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful failure as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England, the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. In the following century it was as completely lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this department he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. His versification, in the same manner, while it gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following generation esteemed so highly, exhibited at the same time the last examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause, and cadence.”^[6. Edinburgh Review ]

Pope is the last great writer of that school of poetry, the poetry of the intellect, or rather of the intellect mingled with the fancy, which occupies the period from the Restoration to the close of the eighteenth century. In Dryden’s satires and miscellaneous poems, we perceive the reasoning poetry brought to its perfection, as far as regards vigour of conception and force of expression. In these respects nothing remained to be added. But Pope possessed that quick tact and intuitive discernment, both of the range and limit of his own powers, and also of the taste of the age, which showed him the solitary direction in which, so far as regarded this philosophic and critical school of poetry, there yet remained an opening for himself. He felt that the qualities of his mind did not fit him to surpass, and scarcely to contend on equal terms, with Dryden, so far as regarded grasp or force; but he’ conceived, that in the way of polish, refinement, grace, and choice of expression, something yet remained to be done, and that that something he was able to afford. Selecting, by a natural preference, themes of a moral and didactic rather than passionate character, adopting the idea that everything should be polished to the highest pitch, and that artifice was the fundamental principle of poetry, that artifice, he thought, could hardly be carried too far; and, accordingly, with Pope we find habitual that attention to words which is only occasional with Dryden. If in Dryden we perceive a tendency to substitute logic and reflection for feeling, to exhibit pictures of conventional and artificial rather than of general nature, and to borrow his illustrations much oftener from science and art than from natural objects, this tendency appears still more decided and uniform in Pope, who is pre-eminently the poet of a period of high intellectual culture and limited poetical sensibilities; the poet who wrought to its last perfection the pure but limited vein which this contemplative and preceptive style of poetry afforded. After Dryden nothing new could have been achieved for this style of poetry, save what has been done by Pope; and what he attempted he perfected.
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It is indeed impossible to award to him a rank in poetry of the same kind with that which had been occupied by our Miltons, Spensers, and Shakspeares. In the highest departments of poetry, the epic and dramatic, he has attempted nothing. In the lyrical he has failed. In translation his example has tended to corrupt the national taste, and to substitute a glittering, false, and metaphrastical version for a true translation. His forte is essentially the didactic and satirical; moral instruction or censure enforced with all the charms or all the point of which such subjects are susceptible. Within that range he has never yet found his equal; for to the logical and reasoning power and condensation of Dryden and of Boileau, he adds at times, as in his Rape of the Lock, an excursiveness and brilliancy of fancy, a compact strength with perfect harmony, a quiet, graceful, continuous humour, altogether without parallel. Yet, whilst speaking of the harmony of his versification, it must be added, that he carried this principle to excess; that his system of terminating the sense invariably with the line, and his pauses, placed almost always on the fourth or sixth syllable, led to a monotony the most painful when contrasted with the varied pauses and lines flowing into each other, which were so happily employed by our elder writers; and that, finally, in regard to rhymes, Pope, though he was singularly limited as to range, was even within that range far from correct.

“The best,” says an eminent critic, “of what we copied from the continental school, is copied in the lighter pieces of Prior. That tone of polite raillery, that airy, rapid, picturesque narrative, mixed up of wit and naivete, that style, in short, of good conversation, concentrated into flowing and polished verses, was not within the vein of our native poets, and probably never would have been known among us, if we had been left to our own resources. It is lamentable that this, which alone was worth borrowing, is the only thing which has not been retained. The tales and little apologues of Prior are still the only examples of this style in our language.”

As we advance through the eighteenth century, we perceive that the critical school of poetry had evidently attained its perfection in Pope, and was destined, at no distant period, to sink into mere prose, disguised under the appearance of verse. At least, after Pope, there is a visible decline, until the appearance of the first germs of a new taste, with which the intellect had less to do, whilst the feelings obtained a more decided supremacy.

Addison’s poetry is so flat, and cold, and destitute of imagination, that, but for the exquisite grace and refined taste of his prose works, it would not now be mentioned; and Swift, though a most clever versifier, and endowed with no ordinary talents for libel in the shape of epigram or satire, can hardly, by any stretch of favour, be regarded as a poet.

The first symptoms of the change which had been gradually going on, appears in the return to a taste for simple instead of artificial nature; for as yet the revival of strong feeling or passion would have met with no sympathetic feeling on the part of the public. In Thomson are to be traced the first symptoms of the reviving taste for the “simple-natural.” True it is, his field is limited. When he attempts narrative, when he indulges in properly didactic poetry, his style appears cumbrous, and his ideas commonplace enough. “Liberty,” says Dr Johnson, “when it first appeared, I tried to read, and soon desisted.” Few at the present day will even make the trial. But when he comes to deal with the matters which lie within his proper sphere, and are congenial to his quiet, contemplative, and indolent turn of mind, he is an original and a striking poet. We must never forget, in speaking of Thomson at the present day, that his poem was the first of its kind, and even yet, like Milton’s Eve, it is the fairest of its daughters.

Even now we must admire the painter-like skill with which, in his rural descriptions, he selects his point of view, the art with which hè seizes the characteristic, and drops the less marking features of the landscape; the infinite variety of little circumstances connected with animate and inanimate nature, unnoticed by his predecessors, but which his quick tact detects and sets before our eyes; the soft, bland, Claude-like glow which he spreads over all he touches; the spirit of love, and benevolence, and philanthropy, which he awakens; qualities which give to his Seasons a fascination which, though felt most strongly in childhood, is yet not materially abated by the judgment of cooler years. His faults are cumbrousness of diction, and occasional vulgarity of taste.

The same sweet and natural tastes, though of a more refined kind, the same philanthropical spirit, and the same gentle inspiration of poetry, are visible in Goldsmith. He has not indeed Thomson’s sympathy with the sublime and terrible in nature; his mind habitually turned towards its milder and more smiling aspects, the fertility and richness of cultivation, the tranquillizing tone of village life, “the short and simple annals of the poor.” “He is refined,” says Mr Campbell, “without false delicacy, and correct without insipidity. Perhaps there is an intellectual composure in his manner, which may in some passages be said to approach to the reserved and prosaic; but he unbends from this grave strain of reflection to tenderness, and even to playfulness, with a peculiar grace, and connects extensive and philosophic views of the happiness and interests of society with pictures of life that touch the heart by their homeliness and familiarity....His whole manner has a still depth of feeling and reflection, which gives back the image of nature unruffled, and minutely. He has no redundant thoughts or false transports, but seems on every occasion to have weighed the impulse to which he surrendered himself; and whatever ardour or casual felicities he may have thus sacrificed, he gained a high degree of purity and sell-possession.”

The names of Blair and Ramsay deserve notice, the first as the author of a poem gloomy and homely, but with a decided character, and a picturesqueness of imagery, which redeem it from vulgarity, and which have been justly compared to the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty; the latter as the writer of a true pastoral drama, in a style totally different from the hackneyed mythological models on the subject, and delineating the natural and simple manners of the peasantry of Scotland, with a truth, a comic archness and tenderness, which entitle the Gentle Shepherd to an honourable rank in British poetry.

A mournful interest attaches itself to the names of Savage and Chatterton, both the victims of misfortunes caused, in some degree, by their irregularities of conduct or deficiency of principle. In the latter, in particular, the seeds of a mind of considerable power are evidently discernible, choked indeed with many rank weeds of evil tendency, but which, pruned and weeded by years and experience, might have rendered him an ornament to the literature of the eighteenth century.

Collins wrote but little, yet that little was of first-rate merit. His Oriental Eclogues may be regarded as only a boyish production; but the rest of his lyrics suffer only by comparison with those of Milton, and that chiefly through a certain obscurity of diction, into which he was led by endeavouring to avoid the commonplaces of expression. In proportion to the neglect which they encountered on their first appearance, has been their popularity since. The Ode on the Passions, in particular, has become a universal favourite, by its admirable personations, the flush of beautiful colouring with which it is invested, and the richness of the versification, which adapts itself with such art to [7:18:173] the themes of sadness and gaiety, or deep gloom, which alternate throughout the poem.

There is strength and nerve, but nothing more, in the ferocious satires of the dissipated Churchill; an undeniable, though very often turgid and unsubstantial, grandeur about Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination; but there is also perfect truth in Johnson’s remark, that the words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived, and that attention deserts the mind and settles on the ear. Some pleasing pictures in Dyer and Armstrong, and a natural grace in Shenstone (which, however, sometimes borders on childishness), will preserve a certain popularity to Grongar Hill, the Art of Preserving Health, and the School-Mistress. The merits of Falconer’s Shipwreck have, we think, been overrated. Its technicalities frequently appear tedious, and few poets have dealt more in needless expletives and mere commonplaces of description. Of Glover, whose Leonidas was once compared to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the world now remembers nothing except his clever ballad of Hozier’s Ghost.

Young is a poet of more fire, and of a decided though perverted ingenuity. He exhibits a curious mixture of the style of Queen Anne’s day with the more pensive and meditative cast of our own. Few poems could be pointed out in which so much point, rare wit, and brilliancy, have been employed with so little effect. The whole poem is a long epigram, a string of hyperboles. It is precisely such a work, indeed, as we should expect to be produced by a person naturally of a cheerful turn of mind, putting on, for the sake of effect, the garb of melancholy, and misanthropy, and weariness of existence; and composing, as he is said to have done, by the light of a candle stuck into a human skull. It has the worst points of Lord Byron’s manner, without the earnestness and verity of that feeling of weariness of the world which speaks throughout Childe Harold.

Gray, in the delicacy, the classical neatness, and polish of his verses, is closely associated with the writers of the age of Anne. There is no doubt a certain want of ease and spontaneity about Gray; his inspiration seems to flow slowly; he rises with compulsion and laborious flight. His poetical fire seems often cold and phosphorescent; but he has a fine sensibility to the beautiful and sublime, a mind richly stored with the beauties of the classical and Italian poets, and he has combined his ideas of invention and recollection in a mosaic of singular delicacy and compactness.

In the Minstrel of Beattie, some of the features of modern poetry become discernible, in its stronger sympathy with nature; nay, even in the general idea of the poem, which describes the solitary growth of a romantic and poetical spirit, and which possesses high merits as a sweet picture of still life, and a vehicle of unobtrusive morality.

But the complete transition from the artificial style of the writers of Queen Anne, to that which characterized the poetry of the opening of the present century, first appears visible in Cowper; who, throwing aside the trammels of artificial refinement, and the imaginary requisites of a conventional poetical diction and classical imagery, ventured to write as he thought, with the force and freedom of an older and a better time. In no poet of the last century did a more vigorous and original cast of mind present itself; and to no poet are we more indebted for awakening that freer and more forcible spirit, that poetry of the heart rather than the head, which has formed the marking feature of our own times. His satirical and didactic poems, though abounding with wit, and animated by the eloquence of conviction, are indeed deformed by many defects, both of indifferent poetry and bigotry of opinion; but in his descriptive poetry, in his charming pictures of in-door life, his summer and winter landscapes (so different from Thomson’s, by their minute detaiD, in those bursts of inspiration which occasionally escape the poet, as in that where he addresses the stars in the fifth book of the Task, he has left us some of the most touching and spirit-stirring passages of which the eighteenth century has to beast.

The same spirit appears, in Scotland, in the deep tenderness of the lyrics of Burns. Much of his poetry, doubtless, can only be remembered with regret, as the effusion of a reckless and ungoverned spirit, mistaking coarseness for force, and confounding genius with extravagance and irregularity. But he has left behind him a few strains which are of a higher mood, nay, of the very highest order; familiar and yet noble, tender and yet manly; such as a peasant only could have written, but a peasant who was one of nature’s nobles. “Scotland,” says an American critic, “owes a large debt of gratitude to Burns; for he invested the feelings and sentiments of its peasantry, their joys and sorrows, with dignity and beauty; he redeemed their language from neglect, if not from contempt; he made the heart of every true Scot burn within him as he thought of the hills and valleys of his native land; he first guided the footstep of the pilgrim to the scenes of her traditionary glories, and he sung those glories in strains so simple, yet sublime, that the world stood still to listen.”

Although, in the poetry of Burns, there are abundant traces of that stern force and strong passion with which we have been of late rather too familiar, the general tone of the poetry of the eighteenth century may be described as quiet and contemplative. But the great and terrible events which darkened its close, exciting the minds of men throughout Europe, introduced into the literature of all nations a spirit of restlessness and doubt, a love of strong agitation and stimulus, which either manifested themselves in a longing retrospection and veneration for the past, or in wild discontent with the present, and delusive visions of the future. This tendency appears in the publication of our ancient ballads, and the enthusiastic admiration which their rough vigour, their simple pathos, and their spirit-stirring pictures of love or war awakened; in the undiscriminating republication and study of our older dramatists of the school of Shakspeare, and our lyrical poets of the period which immediately followed; in the popularity and influence which the works of Goethe and Schiller, stamped with the character of the time, immediately obtained, when introduced to us through the means of wretched translations; and in that mixture of scepticism, moody discontent, and wild enthusiasm which had been painted in such gloomy and forcible colours in the Werther, the Faust, and the Robbers.

On the poetry of the present century, however, we do not intend to enter at all. Many of its most distinguished writers are yet alive; and we are still too near to others to enable us to appreciate their merits with calmness or impartiality. We shall merely remark, that the leading directions which poetry has taken during that period seem reducible to three: The chivalrous poetry of Scott and his school, the taste for which has in a great measure disappeared; the glocmy and sceptical, but most forcible, and occasionally touching poetry of Byron, which may be said to have expired with the great original; and, lastly, the contemplative and philosophical poetry of Wordsworth, the better parts of which are animated by a natural tenderness, and sustained by a moral grandeur, of which the others cannot boast, and which, though its influence over the public mind has been more gradual, promises to maintain a more enduring popularity than either. Crabbe and Campbell alone seem to have been but little influenced by the genius either of Scott, Byron, or Wordsworth, and to have pursued an independent course. In the other poets of the nineteenth century, the influence of one or other of these master-minds, and sometimes of more than one, is too prominent and palpable to be mistaken. (w. w. w. w.) [7:18:174]