vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Catullus. The Augustan age produced nothing equal to their finer passages. cious, was utterly unconscious of their value, and gave up treasures more valuable than the imperial crowns of other countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched but worthless bau ble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass. In France, that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of Madame Géoffrin, was succeeded by writ ers as decorous and as tiresome as gentlemen-ledge is extended, and as the reason developes ushers. The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change. But nowhere has the revolution been more complete and violent than in England. The same person who, when a boy, had clapped his thrilling hands at the first representation of the Tempest, might, without attaining to a marvellous longevity, have lived to read the earlier works of Prior and Addison. The change, we believe, must, sooner or later, have taken place. But its progress was accelerated and its character modified by the political occurrences of the times, and particularly by two events, the closing of the theatres under the Commonwealth, and the restoration of the house of Stuart. We have said that the critical and poetical faculties are not only distinct, but almost incompatible. The state of our literature during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First is a strong confirmation of this remark. The greatest works of imagination that the world has ever seen were produced at that period. The national taste, in the mean time, was to the last degree detestable. Alliterations, puns, antithetical forms of expression lavishly employed where no corresponding opposition existed between the thoughts expressed, strained allegories, pedantic allusions, every thing, in short, quaint and affected in matter and manner, made up what was then considered as fine writing. The eloquence of the bar, the pulpit, and the council-board was deformed by conceits which would have disgraced the rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy. The king quibbled on the throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by reflecting that his majesty was a fool. But the chancellor quibbled in concert from the woolsack, and the chancellor was Francis Bacon. It is needless to mention Sidney and the whole tribe of Euphuists. For Shakspeare himself, the greatest poet that ever lived, falls into the same fault whenever he means to be particularly fine. While he abandons himself to the impulse of his imagination, his compositions are not only the sweetest and the most sublime, but also the most faultless that the world has ever seen. But as soon as his critical powers come into play, he sinks to the level of Cowley, or rather he does ill what Cowley did well. All that is bad in his works is bad elaborately, and of malice aforethought. The only thing wanting to make them perfect was, that he should never have troubled himself with thinking whether they were good or not. Like the angels in Milton, he sinks "with compulsion and laborious flight." His natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar it is only necessary that he should not struggle to fall. He resembled the American cacique who, possessing in unmeasured abundance the metals which in polished societies are esteemed the most preVOL I.-6 We have attempted to show that, as know itself, the imitative arts decay. We should, therefore, expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in the educated classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost constantly the case. The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are, almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a time when persons of quality translated French romances, and when the Universities celebrated royal deaths in verses about Tritons and Fauns, a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim's Progress. And thus a ploughman startled a generation, which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets, with the adventures of Tam O'Shanter. Even in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had degenerated. It retained few vestiges of the imagination of earlier times. It had not yet been subjected to the rules of good taste. Affectation had completely tainted madrigals and sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers of Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of composition at Whitehall and at the Temple. But though the literature of the Court was in its decay, the literature of the people was in its perfection. The Muses had taken sanctuary in the theatres, the haunts of a class whose taste was not better than that of the Right Honourables and singular good Lords who admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and approba tion might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter were never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burningglasses, and tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainderman in an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted as the master and mistress of Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to sleep. No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English drama. Even its inferior pro ductions possess a charm not to be found in any other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror that ever was held up to nature. The creations of the great dramatists of Athens produce the effect of magnificent sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination, polished with the utmost delicacy, imbodying ideas of ineffable majesty and beauty, but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the cheek, and no speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and the faces, in the lovers an the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the Furies there is the same marble chillness and dead D 2 and that of agreeable imitation. The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any degree of justice before the middle of the eighteenth century, might then have been the recognised standards of excellence during the latter part of the seventeenth; and he and the great Elizabethan writers might have been almost immediately succeeded by a generation of poets, similar to those who adorn our own times. Bess. Most of the characters of the French terval between the age of sublime invention stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies in the window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and bedizened, but fixed in such stiff attitudes, and staring with eyes expressive of such utter unmeaningness, that they cannot produce an illusion for a single moment. In the English plays alone is to be found the warmth, the mellowness, and the reality of painting. We know the minds of the men and women, as we know the faces of the men and women of Vandyke. But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They prohibited theatrical representations, and stigmatized the whole race of dramatists as enemies of morality and religion. Much that is objectionable may be found in the writers whom they reprobated; but whether they took the best measures for stopping the evil, appears to us very doubtful, and must, we think, have appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after the lapse of a few years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast out, return to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself. By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of poetry-a school without truth of sentiment or harmony of versificationwithout the powers of an earlier or the correctness of a later age-was left to enjoy undisputed ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness to perceive resemblances and analogies between things apparently heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration. Suckling was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and theological contro The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school consider as defects-from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and from the length and extent of the action. The former is necessary to render the drama a just representation of a world, in which the laughers and the weepers are perpetually jostling each other-in which every event has its serious and its ludicrous side. The latter enables us to form an intimate acquaintance with characters, with which we could not possibly become familiar during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet. In this respect the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are miracies of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three hours, we see a character gradually unfold all its recesses to us. We see it change with the change of circumstances. The petulant youth rises into the politic and warlike sovereign. The profuse and courteous philanthropist sours into a hater and scorner of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the chastening of af-versy. If Waller differed from the Cowleian fliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general, distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks under a conflict between love, strong as death, and jealousy, cruel as the grave. The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step, to the extremities of human depravity. We trace his progress from the first dawnings of unlawful ambition, to the cynical melancholy of his impenitent remorse. Yet, in these pieces, there are no unnatural transitions. Nothing is omitted: nothing is crowded. Great as are the changes, narrow as is the compass within which they are exhibited, they shock us as little as the gradual alterations of those familiar faces which we see every evening and every morning. The magical skill of the poet resembles that of the Dervise in the Spectator, who condensed all the events of seven years into the single moment during which the king held his head under the water. It is deserving of remark, that at the time of which we speak, the plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius-such, for example, as Jonson-were far superior to the best works of imagination in other departments. Therefore, though we conceive that, from causes which we have already investigated, our poetry must necessarily have declined, we think that, unless its fate had been accelerated by external attacks, it might have enjoyed an euthanasia-that genius might have heen kept alive by the drama till its place could, in some degree, be supplied by tasteat there would have been scarcely any in sect of writers, he differed for the worse. He had as little poetry as they, and much less wit: nor is the languor of his verses less offensive than the ruggedness of theirs. In Denham alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible. But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and the Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our literature had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation, we had been islanders. The revolu tions in our taste, like the revolutions in our government, had been settled without the interference of strangers. Had this state of things continued, the same just principles of reasoning, which, about this time, were applied with unprecedented success to every part of phi losophy, would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder code of criticism. There were already strong signs of improvement. Our prose had at length worked itself clear from those quaint conceits which still deformed almost every metrical composition. The parliamentary debates and the diplomatic correspondence of that eventful period had contributed much to this reform. In such bustling times, it was absolutely necessary to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities of Puritanism had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious style, which deforms the writings of Hall and of Lord Bacon, was almost universal, had appeared that stupendous work, the English Bible-a book which, if every thing else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. The respect which the translators felt for the original prevented them from adding any of the hideous decorations then in fashion. The groundwork of the version, indeed, was of an earlier age. The familiarity with which the Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the scriptural phrases, was no doubt very ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but it drove out a cant far more offensive. against their will, been forced to flatter-of which the tragedy of Bayes is a very favour able specimen. What Lord Dorset observed to Edward Howard, might have been addressed to almost all his contemporaries : "As skilful divers to the bottom fall, Swifter than those who cannot swim at all; So, in this way of writing without thinking, Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking." From this reproach some clever men of the world must be expected, and among them The highest kind of poetry is, in a great Dorset himself. Though by no means great measure, independent of those circumstances poets, or even good versifiers, they always which regulate the style of composition in wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit. prose. But with that inferior species of poe-Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what try which succeeds to it, the case is widely a miserable state literature had fallen, than different. In a few years, the good sense and the immense superiority which the occasional good taste which had weeded out affectation rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men from moral and political treatises would, in of this class, possess over the elaborate prothe natural course of things, have effected a ductions of almost all the professed authors. similar reform in the sonnet and the ode. The The reigning taste was so bad, that the success rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed. of a writer was in inverse proportion to his A dominant religion is never ascetic. The labour, and to his desire of excellence. An government connived at theatrical representa- exception must be made for Butler, who had as tions. The influence of Shakspeare was once much wit and learning as Cowley, and who more felt. But darker days were approaching. knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use A foreign yoke was to be imposed on our lite- them. A great command of good homely rature. Charles, surrounded by the compa- English distinguishes him still more from the nions of his long exile, returned to govern a other writers of the time. As for Gondibert, nation which ought never to have cast him out, those may criticise it who can read it. Imaor never to have received him back. Every gination was extinct. Taste was depraved. year which he had passed among strangers Poetry, driven from palaces, colleges, and thehad rendered him more unfit to rule his coun- atres, had found an asylum in the obscure trymen. In France he had seen the refractory dwelling, where a great man, born out of due magistracy humbled, and royal prerogative season, in disgrace, penury, pain, and blind though exercised by a foreign priest in the ness, still kept uncontaminated a character name of a child, victorious over all opposition. and a genius worthy of a better age. This spectacle naturally gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of parliaments had been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults which he had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he adopted their taste in composition; and, when seated on the throne, soon rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by that contemptible policy which, for a time, made England the last of the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained. Every thing about Milton is wonderful; bu nothing is so wonderful as that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have pro duced the greatest of modern epic poems We are not sure that this is not in some de · gree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every person who amuses himself with what is called building castles in the air, must have experienced this. We know artists, who, before they attempt to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are therefore inclined to believe, It was to please Charles that rhyme was that the genius of Milton may have been prefirst introduced into our plays. Thus, a rising served from the influence of times so unfablow, which would at any time have been vourable to it, by his infirmity. Be this as it mortal, was dealt to the English drama, then may, his works at first enjoyed a very small just recovering from its languishing condition. share of popularity. To be neglected by his Two detestable manners, the indigenous and contemporaries was the penalty which he paid the imported, were now in a state of alternate for surpassing them. His great poem was conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic not generally studied or admired, till writers meanness of the new style was blended with the far inferior to him had, by cbsequiously cringingenious absurdity of the old; and the mix-ing to the public taste, acquired sufficient fature produced something which the world had never before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again-something, by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to advantage-something, which those who have attempted to caricature it, have, vour to reform it. Of these Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors, who, during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became conspicuous No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which he belonged, the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy, the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the compass of his volumes. His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly panegyrics-his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent period belong his best dramas-All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and Sebastian-his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his fables, and his odes. and his versification were already far supe rior to theirs. The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression and a fine ear for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be called poetry; but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work, to which the imagination seems to have contributed any thing. It is produced, not by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of inferences. We will give a single instance, and certainly a favourable instance-a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is describing the sea-fight with the Dutch. "Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball; And now their odours armed against them fly Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die." The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the imagination, at once calling up the scene beOf the small pieces which were presented fore the interior eye, but by painful meditation to chancellors and princes, it would scarcely-by turning the subject round and round-by be fair to speak. The greatest advantage tracing out facts into remote consequences, which the fine arts derive from the extension that these incongruous topics are introduced of knowledge is, that the patronage of indivi- into the description. Homer, it is true, perduals becomes unnecessary. Some writers petually uses epithets which are not peculiarly still affect to regret the age of patronage. appropriate. Achilles is the swift-footed, when None but bad writers have reason to regret it. he is sitting still. Ulysses is the much-endurIt is always an age of general ignorance. ing, when he has nothing to endure. Every Where ten thousand readers are eager for the spear casts a long shadow; every ox has appearance of a book, a small contribution crooked horns; and every woman a high bosom, from each makes up a splendid remuneration though these particulars may be quite beside for the author. Where literature is a luxury, the purpose. In our old ballads a similar confined to few, each of them must pay high. practice prevails. The gold is always red, and If the Empress Catherine, for example, wanted the ladies always gay, though nothing whatever an epic poem, she must have wholly supported may depend on the hue of gold, or the temper the poet-just as, in a remote country village, of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere a man who wants a mutton-chop is sometimes customary additions. They merge in the sub forced to take the whole sheep ;-a thing which stantives to which they are attached. If the never happens where the demand is large. at all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so sligh But men who pay largely for the gratification as in no respect to alter the general effect. In of their taste, will expect to have it united the passage which we have quoted from Drywith some gratification to their vanity. Flat- den, the case is very different. Preciously and tery is carried to a shameless extent; and the aromatic divert our whole attention to themhabit of flattery almost inevitably introduces selves, and dissolve the image of the battle in a false taste into composition. Its language a moment. The whole poem reminds us of is made up of hyperbolical commonplaces-Lucan, and of the worst parts of Lucan, the offensive from their triteness-and still more offensive from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his language sea-fight in the bay of Marseilles, for example. The description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced Dryden a good rhymer, but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers, in whom the period of imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and reflection. DRYDEN. His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, | rested emotion-a loyalty extending to passive are admirable subjects for those who wish to obedience-a religion like that of the Quietists, study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. was utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting We see nothing but despotism without power, real human beings. Even in the far inferior and sacrifices without compensation. talent of composing characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes a very coarse and marked distinction; and gives up, not a likeness, but a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and every thing else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inndoor, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble any thing in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the wa We will give a few instances:-In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra, falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly: ters under the earth. "Do not your anger, like your love, is vain: This is no idle menace. She soon brings a "This fatal paper rather let me tear, "You may; but 'twill not be your best advice; Poor Arimant seems to be of the same In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents to murder his two sons, and a benefactor, to whom he feels the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conwith Abdelmelech. He complains that sho quest of Granada, assumes the same lofty tone smiles upon his rival. The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough. But they Those of Smollet are perhaps worse. do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce, hard impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for such gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers, they do not perhaps exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals in a style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes and heroines, who appear as the representatives of good society, and who, at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures are unredeemed by any quality of a different description, by any touch of kindness, or That these passages violate all historical even by an honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world where there is no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame propriety; that sentiments, to which nothing a world for which any good-natured man similar was ever even affected except by the would gladly take in exchange the society of cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico Milton's devils. But as soon as we enter the and Agra, is a light accusation. We have no regions of Tragedy, we find a great change. objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian The is no lack of the fine sentiment there. puritan, or a Bohemian seaport. While the Metastasio is surpassed in his own department. faces are good, we care little about the backScuderi is out-scuderied. We are introduced ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says, that the to people whose proceedings we can trace to curtains and hangings in an historical painting no motive of whose feelings we can form no ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely more idea than of a sixth sense. We have drapery. The same principle should be ap left a race of creatures, whose love is as deli-plied to poetry and romance. The truth of eate and affectionate as the passion which an character is the first object; the truth of place alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves and time is to be considered only in the second among beings, whose love is purely disinte- place. Puff himself could tell the actor to turn JA "Lynd. Abdel. Lynd. That you should regulate each look of mine? 'Twas during pleasure-'tis revoked this hour. |