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

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

The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste, are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded, the merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we conceive them to be

ica

which criticism can effect of poetry is neces-
sarily imperfect. One element must forever
elude its researches; and that is the very ele
ment by which poetry is poetry. In the de-
scription of nature, for example, a judicious
reader will easily detect an incongruous im-
age. But he will find it impossible to explain
in what consists the art of a writer who, in a
few words, brings some spot before him so
vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived
there from childhood; while another, employ-
ing the same materials, the same verdure, the
same water, and the same flowers, committing
no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can
be positively pronounced superfluous, omitting
nothing which can be positively pronounced
necessary, shall produce no more effect than
an advertisement of a capital residence and a
desirable pleasure-ground. To take another
example, the great features of the character of
Hotspur are obvious to the most superficial
reader. We at once perceive that his courage
is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his ani-
mal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary,
and petulant; that he indulges his own humour
without caring whose feelings he may wound
or whose enmity he may provoke, by his levi
ty. Thus far criticism will go. But some
thing is still wanting. A man might have us
those qualities, and every other quality
the most minute examiner can introduce into
his catalogue of the virtues and faces of Hot-
spur, and yet he would not be Hotspur. Al-
most every thing that we have said of him ap-
plies equally to Falconbride. Yet in the
mouth of Falconbridge, most of his speeches
would seem out of place. a real life, this per-
petually occurs. We are sensible of wide dif-
ferences between men whom, if we are required
to describe them, we should describe in almost
the same terms. If we were attempting to draw
elaborate characters of them, we should scarce-
ly be able to point out any strong distinction; yet
we approach them with feelings altogether dis-
similar. We cannot conceive of them as using
the expressions or gestures of each other. Let
us suppose that a zoologist should attempt to
give an account of some animal, a porcupine
for instance, to people who had never seen it.
The porcupine, he might say, is of the genus
mammalia, and the order gliris. There are
whiskers on its face; it is two feet long; it
has four toes before, five behind, two foreteeth,
and eight grinders. Its body is covered with
hair and quills. And when all this had been
said, would any one of the auditors have
formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would
any two of them have formed the same idea?
There might exist innumerable races of ani-

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

have been mentioned, yet altogether unlike to each other. What the description of our natu

DRYDEN.

greatest of human calamities, without once vio
lating the reverence due to it; at that discrimi-
nating delicacy of touch which makes a charac-
ter exquisitely ridiculous without impairing its
worth, its grace, or its dignity. In Don Quixote
are several dissertations on the principles of
poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in
the whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour
and attention; and no passages in any work
with which we are acquainted are more worth-
less and puerile. In our time they would scarcely
obtain admittance into the literary department
of the Morning Post. Every reader of the Di-
vine Comedy must be struck by the veneration
which Dante expresses for writers far inferior
to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from
the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all
whose works are not worth the worst of his

ralist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of
criticism are to the images of poetry. What
it so imperfectly decomposes, it cannot per-
fectly reconstruct. It is evidently as impossi-
ble to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by re-
versing an analytical process so defective as
it would be for an anatomist to form a living
man out of the fragments of his dissecting
room. In both cases, the vital principle eludes
the finest instruments, and vanishes in the
very instant in which its seat is touched.
Hence those who, trusting to their critical
skill, attempt to write poems, give us not im-
ages of things, but catalogues of qualities.
Their characters are allegories; not good men
and bad men, but cardinal virtues and deadly
sins. We seem to have fallen among the ac-
quaintances of our old friend Christian: some-
times we meet Mistrust and Timorous: some-own hundred cantos. He does not venture to
times Mr. Hate-good and Mr. Love-lust; and
then again Prudence, Piety, and Charity.

tius. His admiration of Virgil is absolute walk in the same line with the bombastic StaThat critical discernment is not sufficient to idolatry. If indeed it had been excited by the make men poets is generally allowed. Why elegant, splendid and harmonious diction of it should keep them from becoming poets, is the Roman poet, it would not have been altonot perhaps equally evident. But the fact is,gether unreasonable; but it is rather as an authat poetry requires not an examining, but a thority on all points of philosophy, than as a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, work of imagination, that he values the Æneid. and write it best, who forget that it is a work The most trivial passages he regards as oraof art; to whom its imitations, like the reali- cles of the highest authority, and of the most ties from which they are taken, are subjects recondite meaning. He describes his connot for connoisseurship, but for tears and ductor as the sea of all wisdom, the sun which laughter, resentment and affection, who are too heals every disordered sight. As he judged of much under the influence of the illusion to ad- Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century mire the genius which has produced it; who judged of him; they were proud of him; they are too much frightened for Ulysses in the praised him; they struck medals bearing his cave of Polyphemus, to care whether the pun head; they quarrelled for the honour of posabout Outis be good or bad; who forget that sessing his remains; they maintained profesnot that mighty imagination such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, sors to expound his writings. But what they while they weep and curse with Lear. It is admired was by giving faith to the creations of the imagina- which called a new world into existence, and tion that a man becomes a poet. It is by treat-made all its sights and sounds familiar to the ing those creations as deceptions, and by re- eye and ear of the mind. They said little of solving them, as nearly as possible, into their those awful and lovely creations on which laelements, that he becomes a critic. In the ter critics delight to dwell-Farinata lifting of everlasting fire-the lion-like repose of Sormoment in which the skill of the artist is per- his haughty and tranquil brow from his couch ceived, the spell of the art is broken. These considerations account for the absurd- dello-or the light which shone from the celesities into which the greatest writers have fal- tial smile of Beatrice. They extolled their len, when they have attempted to give general great poet for his smattering of ancient literarules for composition, or to pronounce judg-ture and history; for his logic and his divinity ment on the works of others. They are unaccustomed to analyze what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them. They feel pleasure in reading a book. They never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas, which some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link or a chain of associations, may have called up in their own minds-that they have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

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

for his absurd physics, and his more absurd
metaphysics; for every thing but that in which
he pre-eminently excelled. Like the fool in
the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging
for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was con-
cealed under its foundations, they laid waste
one of the noblest works of human genius, by
seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom,
which existed only in their own wild reveries.
The finest passages were little valued till they
gory. Louder applause was given to the lec-
had been debased into some monstrous alle-
ture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous
astronomical theories, than to those remen-
dous lines which disclose the secrets of the
tower of hunger; or to that half-told tale c
We do not mean to say that the contempo.
guilty love, so passionate and so full of tears.
raries of Dante read, with less emotion than
D
their descendants, of Ugolino groping among
the wasted corpses of his children, or of Fran

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

forth our tears, to the art by which those images the heart only knoweth, a joy with which a have been selected and combined. We applaud stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, the genius of the writer. We applaud our own by which ideas are to be conveyed from one sagacity and sensibility, and we are comforted. person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Yet, though we think that, in the progress of Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. nations towards refinement, the reasoning The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their powers are improved at the expense of the ima- lowest state. But the actions of men amply gination, we acknowledge, that to this rule prove that the faculty which gives birth to there are many apparent exceptions. We are those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the not, however, quite satisfied that they are more inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the than apparent. Men reasoned better, for ex- amusement of the day, the terror of the night, ample, in the time of Elizabeth than in the the fertile source of wild superstitions. It time of Egbert; and they also wrote better turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the poetry. But we must distinguish between poetry winds into doleful voices. The belief which and a mental act, and poetry as a species of springs from it is more absolute and undoubtcomposition. If we take it in the latter sense, ing than any which can be derived from eviits excellence depends, not solely on the vigour dence. It resembles the faith which we reof the imagination, but partly also on the in- pose in cur own sensations. Thus, the Arab, struments which the imagination employs. when covered with wounds, saw nothing but Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may be the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckimproving, while the poetical faculty is decay- oning Houri. The Northern warrior laughed ing. The vividness of the picture presented in the pangs of death, when he thought of the to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to mead of Valhalla. the vividness of the prototype which exists in the mind of the writer. In the other arts we see this clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with all the genius of Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction as to the management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of the human body, he would produce something compared with which the Highlander at the door of the snuff-shop would deserve admiration. If an uninitiated Raphael were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say, that the early works of Raphael are little better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination?quire no other company. She will nurse it, Who can doubt that the youth of that great ar- dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up tist was passed amidst an ideal world of beauti- man takes half so much delight in one of the ful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same the difference which appears between his first manner, savages are more affected by the rude rude essays, and his magnificent Transfigura-compositions of their bards than nations more tion, to a change in the constitution of his advanced in civilization by the greatest masmind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, terpieces of poetry. it is necessary that the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey it to others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet, till he has looked with attention on the face of nature; or a great dramatist, till he has felt and witnessed much of the influence of the passions. Information and experience are, therefore, necessary; not for the purpose of strengthening the imagination, which is never so strong as in people incapable of reasoning-savages, children, madmen, and dreamers; but for the purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his conceptions to others.

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they must necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are to be supplied by the susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We all know what pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for sixpence, will afford to a little girl. She will re

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination than their rude ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they produce better works of imagination. Thus, up to a certain period, the diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers stand in need. Then comes the short period of splendid and consummate excellence. And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle, poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more obvious. When the advenIn a barbarous age the imagination exercises turer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his a despotic power. So strong is the perception eyes with the contents of the magical box, alt of what is unreal, that it often overpowers all the riches of the earth, however widely dis the passions of the mind, and all the sensations persed, however sacredly concealed, became of the body. At first, indeed, the phantasm re-visible to him. But when he tried the experimains undivulged, a hidden treasure, a wordless poetry, an invisible painting, a silent music, a dream of which the pains and pleasures exist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which

ment on both eyes, he was struck with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body, language is to the sight of the imagination. At first it calls up a world

of glorious illusions, but when it becomes too | wonderful models of former times are justly copious, it altogether destroys the visual power. appreciated. The frigid productions of a later As the development of the mind proceeds, age are rated at no more than their proper symbols, instead of being employed to convey value. Pleasing and ingenious imitations of images, are substituted for them. Civilized the manner of the great masters appear. Poetmen think as they trade, not in kind, but by ry has a partial revival, a St. Martin's Summeans of a circulating medium. In these cir- mer, which, after a period of dreariness and cumstances the sciences improve rapidly, and decay, agreeably reminds us of the splendour criticism among the rest; but poetry, in the of its June. A second harvest is gathered in; highest sense of the word, disappears. Then though, growing on a spent soil, it has not the comes the dotage of the fine arts, a second heart of the former. Thus, in the present age, childhood, as feeble as the former, and far Monti has successfully imitated the style of more hopeless. This is the age of critical Dante; and something of the Elizabethan inpoetry, of poetry by courtesy, of poetry to spiration has been caught by several eminent which the memory, the judgment, and the wit countrymen of our own. But never will Italy contribute far more than the imagination. We produce another Inferno, or England another readily allow that many works of this descrip- Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the motion are excellent; we will not contend with dern imitations with feelings similar to those those who think them more valuable than the with which we see flowers disposed in vases great poems of an carlier period. We only to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital. maintain that they belong to a different species We doubtless regard them with pleasure, with of composition, and are produced by a differ- greater pleasure, perhaps, because, in the midst ent faculty. of a place ungenial to them, they remind us of the distant spots on which they flourish in spontaneous exuberance. But we miss the sap, the freshness, and the bloom. Or, if we may borrow another illustration from Queen Scheherezade, we would compare the writers of this school to the jewellers who were employed to complete the unfinished window of the palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill or cost could do was done. 'Palace and bazaar were ransacked for precious stones. Yet the artists, with all their dexterity, with all their assiduity, and with all their vast means, were unable to produce any thing comparable to the wonders which a spirit of a higher order had wrought in a single night.

It is some consolation to reflect that this critical school of poetry improves as the science of criticism improves; and that the science of criticism, like every other science, is constantly tending towards perfection. As experiments are multiplied, principles are better understood.

In some countries, in our own, for example, there has been an interval between the downfall of the creative school and the rise of the critical, a period during which imagination has been in its decrepitude, and taste in its infancy. Such a revolutionary interregnum as this will be deformed by every species of extravagance. The first victory of good taste is over the bombast and conceits which deform such times The history of every literature with which as these. But criticism is still in a very im- we are acquainted confirms, we think, the perfect state. What is accidental is for a long principles which we have laid down. In time confounded with what is essential. Ge- Greece we see the imaginative school of poetneral theories are drawn from detached facts. ry gradually fading into the critical. EschyHow many hours the action of a play may be lus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles; allowed to occupy-how many similes an epic Sophocles by Euripides; Euripides by the poet may introduce into his first book-whe- Alexandrian versifiers. Of these last, Theother a piece which is acknowledged to have a critus alone has left compositions which debeginning and end may not be without a mid-serve to be read. The splendid and grotesque dle, and other questions as puerile as these, fairy-land of the Old Comedy, rich with such formerly occupied the attention of men of let-gorgeous hues, peopled with such fantastic ters in France, and even in this country. Poets, in such circumstances as these, exhibit all the narrowness and feebleness of the criticism by which their manner has been fashioned. From outrageous absurdity they are preserved indeed by their timidity. But they perpetually sacrifice nature and reason to arbitrary canons of taste. In their eagerness to avoid the mala prohibita of a foolish code, they are perpetually rushing on the mala in se. Their great predecessors, it is true, were as bad critics as themselves, or perhaps worse; but those predecessors, as we have attempted to show, were inspired by a faculty independent of criticism, and therefore wrote well while they judged ill.

In time men begin to take more rational and comprehensive views of literature. The analysis of poetry, which, as we have remarked, nust at best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer to exactness. The merits of the

shapes, and vocal alternately with the sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish laughter, disappeared forever. The masterpieces of the New Comedy are known to us by Latin translations of extraordinary merit. From these translations, and from the expressions of the ancient critics, it is clear that the original compositions were distinguished by grace and sweetness, that they sparkled with wit and abounded with pleasing sentiments, but that the creative power was gone. Julius Cæsar called Terence a half Menander-a sure proof that Menander was not a quarter Aristophanes.

The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the literature of the Greeks.. The pupils started from the point at which their masters had in the course of many generations arrived. They thus almost wholly missed the period of original invention. The only Latin poets whose writings exhibit much