House in the neighbourhood, he was originally a Smugler, and changed his Name from Yorke to Tichener, before he took the publick House.

I shall have a watch upon the Daughter and discover whether there is any connection between her and Shelley. I shall come to Town on Wednesday.

As I am to see Mr. Scott tomorrow, I shall keep the Brighton Papers untill I have seen him.

Your's most sincerely

CHICHESTER.

I send my Receipt enclosed, you will be so good as to pay the Salary to Messrs. Hoare's.'

1 The foregoing papers, forming Appendix VI, have not been corrected or amended, as far as this edition is concerned. Harriet's letter to Miss Hitchener I have left just as I found it; and the letters of Mr. Fellowes and the Earl of Chichester I have given verbatim

et literatim from the

originals, kindly lent to me by Lord Carlingford. The Earl of Chichester's spelling and punctuation are not altogether beyond reproach; and his Lordship cannot be regarded as in any sense an accurate letter-writer. I have omitted an unpleasant inaccuracy from his first paragraph.

PROSE. VOL. III.

CC

VII.

THE FOUR AGES OF POETRY.

BY THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK.'

Qui inter hæc nutriuntur non magis sapere possunt, quam bene olere qui in culinâ habitant.-Petronius.

POETRY, like the world, may be said to have four ages, but in a different order: the first age of poetry being the age of iron; the second, of gold; the third of silver; and the fourth of brass.

The first, or iron age of poetry, is that in which rude bards celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs, in days when every man is a warrior, and when the great practical maxim of every form of society, "to keep what we have and to catch what we can," is not yet disguised under names of justice and forms of law, but is the naked motto of the naked sword, which is the only judge and jury in every question of meum and tuum. In these days, the only three trades flourishing (besides that of priest, which flourishes always) are those of king, thief, and beggar: the beggar being, for the most part, a king deject, and the thief a king expectant. asked of a stranger is, whether he is a beggar or a thief: the stranger, in reply, usually assumes the first, and awaits

1 Published in Ollier's Literary Miscellany, 1820. See Note to Defence of Poetry, Vol. III, p. 98.

The first question

2 See the Odyssey, passim: and Thucydides, I. 5. [PEACOCK'S NOTE.]

a convenient opportunity to prove his claim to the second appellation.

The natural desire of every man to engross to himself as much power and property as he can acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king: his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.

The first rude

Poetry is thus in its origin panegyrical. songs of all nations appear to be a sort of brief historical notices, in a strain of tumid hyperbole, of the exploits and possessions of a few pre-eminent individuals. They tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.

This is the first stage of poetry before the invention of written letters. The numerical modulation is at once

useful as a help to memory, and pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound and, from the exceeding flexibility of the yet unformed language, the poet does no violence to his ideas in subjecting them to the fetters of number. The savage, indeed, lisps in numbers, and all rude and uncivilized people express themselves in the manner which we call poetical.

The scenery by which he is surrounded, and the superstitions which are the creed of his age, form the poet's mind. Rocks, mountains, seas, unsubdued forests, unnavigable rivers, surround him with forms of power and mystery, which ignorance and fear have peopled with spirits, under multifarious names of gods, goddesses, nymphs, genii, and dæmons. Of all these personages marvellous tales are in existence the nymphs are not indifferent to handsome young men, and the gentlemengenii are much troubled and very troublesome with a propensity to be rude to pretty maidens: the bard, therefore, finds no difficulty in tracing the genealogy of his chief to any of the deities in his neighbourhood with whom the said chief may be most desirous of claiming relationship.

In this pursuit, as in all others, some, of course, will attain a very marked pre-eminence; and these will be held in high honour, like Demodocus in the Odyssey, and will be consequently inflated with boundless vanity, like Thamyris in the Iliad. Poets are as yet the only historians and chroniclers of their time, and the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age; and though this knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths, yet, such as it is, they have it to themselves. They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and fighting: and

though their object be nothing more than to secure a share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not by physical power: their success excites emulation to the attainment of intellectual eminence : thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken those of others, at the same time that they gratify vanity and amuse curiosity. A skilful display of the little knowledge they have gains them credit for the possession of much more which they have not. Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of inspiration ; thus they are not only historians, but theologians, moralists, and legislators: delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.

The golden age of poetry finds its materials in the age of iron. This age begins when poetry begins to be retrospective; when something like a more extended system of civil polity is established; when personal strength and courage avail less to the aggrandizing of their possessor, and to the making and marring of kings and kingdoms, and are checked by organized bodies, social institutions, and hereditary successions. Men also live more in the light of truth and within the interchange of observation; and thus perceive that the agency of gods and genii is not so frequent among themselves as, to judge from the songs and legends of the past time, it was among their ancestors. From these two circumstances, really diminished personal power, and apparently diminished familiarity with gods and genii, they very easily and naturally deduce