OFTEN as we have desired to summon the attention of our readers to the interesting subject of the literary prospects and intellectual state of this country, we have been deterred by the consideration of the varied topics, with which a full and accurate view of this subject must be complicated. Of these, some are difficult to pronounce upon with accuracy or precision; some entangled in dispute, some involved in party feeling. It is easy to conceive, how any question that affects the nation's mind must comprehend views from which the literary essayist would gladly extricate the train of his reasoning, did a just regard to truth allow. But the literature of a nation, and of this nation in particular, is affected by its political state and influential upon it. And this double dependance becomes more important, either as effect or cause, in proportion as the stage of civilization is lower, and the operation of the conservative principles of society less developed.

Though we shall endeavor to keep on the surface of common interest, yet we must bespeak some intelligent attention, while we attempt a brief statement of the general causes by which the country is, in this respect, retarded or advanced.

Of these general causes, three claim especial notice. The state of the time, the state of Ireland as affected by it, and the state of literature at this period. From these heads a correct and comprehensive view of the difficulties before us will be obtained. From this, we can more clearly ascertain the advantages to be looked for in the promotion of our home literature. And lastly, estimate satisfactorily, our capabilities, advantages, and the progress we have actually gained. Such, we trust, will be felt to offer no uninteresting train of inquiry and reflection, to any one who feels an interest in the real honor and improvement of his country. The most standard perfection of legislative institutions would be an inadequate substitute for the blessing of civilization; without this, mild laws can afford no shelter, equal rights would be an injustice, and freedom but an abuse.

In taking a compass, which, to some, may at first appear more wide than is necessary for the purpose of consider

ing the literary prospects of this country, we can only say that our view requires it, and request a patient hearing. To consider the objects of literature, otherwise than in its bearing on the more permanent interests, and more vital and essential elements of national progress, would be to narrow a most extensive subject into one of little moment. In this tempestuous crisis, when the elements of the social state appear to be involved in a preternatural rapidity of progression, either for good or evil, we should be ashamed to sit gravely engaged in speculating on the progress of the tenth-rate poetry, or third-rate scholarship of the day. We care little how the souvenirs and forget-me-nots might best multiply their insect existence, or the twopenny ballad-mongers find favor with Curry and Co. All this, though harmless in itself, and even desirable as a portion of more important changes, may well lie over for future consideration. When the hopes of the year are secured, and the bladed fields set our hearts at rest for the future harvest, we may find leisure to watch the humble-bee in his honied range, or to be amused by the butterfly as its painted wing glances from flower to flower amidst the gay profusion of the spring. Not that we are deficient in the cordial goodwill which rises in our breast, when we behold the teeming, but not superfluous, trifles of modern literary journey-work piled in all their elegance of external ornament on the publisher's table; or that we are insensible enough not to feel a more intense and lively satisfaction, when, by the inestimable kindness of the worthy authors, these valuable specimens of typography and binding, appear on our own table, and awaken our hearts to silent gladness-tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus. But it is not with these, or even with the productions of a higher form, that we feel ourselves engaged in entering on a topic, which, according to our social theory, embraces the most important principles of national welfare.

It is one of the most important distinctions between us and England, that its literature and civilization have begun in distant ages. When the morasses and forests of Ireland were yet under the domination of the "ragged royal race of Tara," as they are not in

aptly described by our national lyrist Moore, and our fine peasantry were the oppressed slaves of chieftains as unlettered as themselves: the fathers of English poetry, the Chaucers, and the Gowers, and the Surreys, and the Spensers had long bequeathed their deathless names and writings to the mind of time. The literature of England appeared as a star "in the forehead of the morning sky" from the very twilight of the cloistered superstitions of the middle ages, and shed its early light on the foundations of the British constitution. It has grown with its growth, into a splendor and stability, which changes and political concussions have had no power to lessen. And what is more to our purpose, it has slowly and efficiently, in the course of ages, produced all its varied effects upon the nation's mind. It is desirable that the reader should conceive these effects-a sentence will point them out. It is well known that there is in every educated nation (though in different degrees) a process whereby opinion, as it becomes accumulated and matured, becomes expanded, simplified, and reduced to practice; passing in this progress from the student in his closet to the artizan in his warehouse, and the peasant in his hamlet. Thus it has often been noticed, that the abstruse learning of one time tends to become the popular opinion of the following. And what is at least equally important, though Jess observable, an imperceptible moral growth, which may be regarded as the effect of this, is also taking place with more constancy. This can only indeed be measured, by the means which we have of comparing man in distant intervals, or in distinct stages of civilization. Now, in Ireland, the case is widely different ; our literature, or rather our literary cultivation, has been recently engrafted; and under cirIcumstances which must have controlled its influences most unfavorably. There was here nothing of that expanding downward of mind-that slow communication of opinion that incorporation of knowledge with the mind-that subduing and correcting or altering of old manners, prejudices, and associations, which is the actual progress of eivilization. This can be but the result of time its very first causes cannot be said to have existed here. The civilization of our higher orders was but a light across the waters from another shore-too feeble in its expansion

to shed influence on the crowd. It was isolated refinement, seated on the verge of primitive rudeness. The line between the educated and uneducated classes was too broad-a dark, impassable gulph, from the depths of which national animosities, barbaric prejudices and superstitions, and the resisting powers of a domineering hierarchy, exhaled their anti-civilizing influences. But we must pass to the present, before we see the accumulated effect of these. To appreciate our present state, we must take one short glance upon the present position of British literature.

In England, literature is at the present moment retrogressive. This, with regard to that country is an occasional recurrence of small importance; but as it nearly affects the question as to our own progress, it behoves us to give it some attention. Two causes, quite opposite in their nature and tendencies, have affected the literature of the day; one, the influence of political excitement which has absorbed the public attention, and diminished the power of all the milder sources of excitement. The other, more curious and less understood, will require a few more words.

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A spirit, unfavorable to literature, has been aided by the corruption of literature. This requires a few remarks. The exigencies of multiplied political business have lowered the tone of political oratory and writing into a style more adapted to detail, and employing a far inferior class of faculties. In addition to this fact may be noticed another, pe:haps more effective in the same way; the causes which have brought the popular mind more largely into the discussion of public questions, have necessarily called for a more superficial method and style. Profound and general views may preside in the cabinet of the statesman, but when he stands up in his place he must keep to the level of the hustings if he would be heard or read. The graceful and persuasive, or impressive appeal to the principles of an enlightened audience, or to the inborn feelings of humanity, or the venerable conventions of time, would be out of place, and listened to with just impatience by modern men of business and detail, wisely economical of time. As for wit, and the tasteful embellishment of style, their day has long gone by; they would hang upon the slipshod newspaper proșe of a modern debate,

as Gibbons's flowered carvings, on the rough but useful masonry of Kingstown pier. We are not here speaking the language of critical censure, which would be misplaced and ridiculous. We state the fact, as it is and ought to be. It is only with its bearing on our peculiar topic we are concerned.

The second of our proposed principles is more difficult to deal with, as it is itself an opposite principle, and in a great measure to be regarded as the existing progress of the intellect of the age. But we claim candid and discriminating attention. The modern advance of discovery and invention has been rapid beyond any known rate of human progress; and in this, there can be but one concurring sentiment of admiration and thankfulness.* But we have nothing to do with this. In this vast movement the public mind has received a proportionate impulse; and the effect on taste, style, and language, and on the cultivation of all arts not immediately 'connected with it, has been marked and great. The old conventions of the human mind soon began to dissolve before the ascendency of change: the ancient forms of thought and the barriers of style were broken down to let in a deluge of opinion, and to enlarge the bounds of speech to the measure of these new and vast accessions to the stock of knowledge. Of this, two consequences arose, the effects on the manner and on the matter of English composition. In the first, the nice, subtle and refined rules, which result from the very constitution of the mind, and which are exemplified in all those standard writings which have ever survived the fashion of their hour, were abandoned and forgotten. A style, expanded beyond all due bounds, swoln with a new language, the result of new theories, and stripped of the old harmony and the terse idiom of a style that had gradually arisen from the study of the classic models, came into vogue, and obtained possession of the rising generation. By this poetry and prose were alike affected; and the whole body of English literature

passed into a state of transition, the less perceivable as the critic partook of the spirit of the time. It became an object to attain facility, abundance and simplicity; but the progress was forced beyond the natural rate of the mind. The facility became slipshod laxitythe abundance, indiscriminate and torrent verbosity-and the simplicity, incomposite vulgarity. Now, although this revolutionary stage of literature may be, and, in our opinion is, the needful preliminary to a happier stage, in which the dregs of change shall have cleared away and the crude materials become combined into a harmonious form: yet in the meantime, literature has lost its enchantment with its chaste and cultivated grace. A feeble luxuriance of new-coined words, phrases only striking as innovations, metaphors profuse and inappropriate, illustrations by obscure conceit, are the overflowing ornaments of the large class of writers who occupy the London press. This was for a time concealed and moderated by the happy concurrence of half a dozen illustrious writers, amongst whom Scott and Byron may be named-equal to those of any period or nation. After these, with their distinguished peers, all referable to the previous period, had left the stage, a cloud of clever writers, whom their fame concealed, began to occupy their places in public notice, and to overflow the press with glittering inanity and florid poverty. New leaders, iu the dearth of better, rose to eminence: and distinguished themselves as inferiors can alone be distinguished, by exaggeration and monstrosities of every sort. Bombast; fantastic niceties; gallicisms; paradoxes involving silly truism, and affected violations of English idiom-At magnum fecit, quod verbis Græca Latinis miscuit. For the truth of these remarks we refer the critical reader to the novels and poetry of the last ten years; to the great mass of public speeches, and to the London fashionable periodicals, monthly and annual; with, however, this qualifying remark, that by far the most sterling portion of the talent of

the day has, of late years, found its way into our periodical literature. Such being the state of the time, there is nothing in literature apart from its distortions and unnatural stimuli, to occupy the attention of the better portion of the public intellect. They who have taste and leisure find it ne cessary to go back to the period of a more sterling nature. But the ex+ igencies of business, or the love of artificial excitement, such as may be satisfied by the dregs of the circulating libraries, supply the whole of the demand for the multifarious, but corrupt and surface literature of the day. This vicious state of things is much aggravated by reaction, from the tone of intercourse it has caused. The conversation of eminent men has no attraction, no refined sparkle of wit, no profound remark, no play of comment and criticism, no attic repose; their speaking, nothing of standard eloquence. This, to be sure, is as it should be; we are not the fools to censure. In the stirring strife of the age, no leading mind can stay to puzzle about the humanities: we claim no proud exemption from the taint of the time, or the infirmities of human nature. We frankly plead guilty to these charges, if such they can be called: in our composition, we are not always too fastidious in language, or over nice in harmony we cannot always resist the temptation of glitter without appropriateness and the noble desire to emancipate poetry from those severe laws which were once supposed to constitute its peculiar character and charm and we feel, like our brother bards, that the composition of verse is much facilitated by adopting the loose periods of a fustian prose. We would not be thought fastidious in these days of literary license, and trust for our excuse to the frankness of our confession. But the truth must be told; literature is for the present, like many better things, broken up and deprived of its higher influences. We are in one of those dull cycles which have often come round to damp the spirit of every age; we have revolved to the days of Hayley, and the della Cruscan school. We are not, like that emasculated school, devoid of matter, and prolix without sense. Our error is in the other extreme; instead of style without sense,

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our fault is circumstantial dulness with out attention to style. But the result is, there is no public feeling in favor of literature, and there is nothing in literature to merit such a feeling. We do not, however, wish to derive strength from exaggeration ; and on this point, there is one remark which we cannot pass in silence. It is very usual to refer the whole of the ill success of literary specula tions to the apathy of the public.→ This we believe to be an overstatement, Nothing worthy of success in any eminent degree, has now, or at any time, failed to attract the degree of attention to which it has been entitled by its merits. On the contrary, in the dullest of times, the public has its fa vourites-in the absence of higher names, the writers of the cockney school are read; and there is a stir and bustle among the publishers which, for a moment, appears opposed to our theory. But there is a solution for this difficulty. The vast increase of the middle order has brought with it a proportional influx of minds and interests into the field of intellectual and commercial action; a vast increase both of readers and writers is the consequence, and with it an increase of trade, which indicates nothing but the merely numerical increment which has caused it. Every one reads more or less→→→ tracts, compilations, abstracts, abridgments, and elementary treatises, altogether unconnected with literature, (in its idiomatic sense,) form the better part of this reading. The ornamental publications, which owe their chief attractions to embellishment, and which swell their bulk with prose and verse that no one thinks of reading, occupy a large share of this trade, and hold to literature the place which the modern puppet-shows of the stage obtain with respect to the legitimate drama. A vast multiplicity of readers, has created a demand for books: but even this is magnified to observation, by another consequence, distinct from any we have mentioned: the vast production of works which have no circulation and no readers. These are published at the expense of their authors, and afford no measure of the public market. We have stated these facts with sparing moderation, and with the consciousness of treading on delicate

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ground. There is a partizanship in the time, that affects all subjects which are open to the discussions of opinion: and we write in fear of giving offence to the fanaticism of schools, the admirers and idolaters of the vices of great men.

All changes find their period. The time cannot be far remote for the restoration of literature to its legitimate form and influence. There are heads and hearts enough, which have not bowed the knee to Baal; and a few leading writers, in the seasonable moment will suffice to bring back a more regulated and principled tone, to the public taste. It only requires that the attention of the more solid intellects as yet absorbed in more vital operations, should be turned to the cultivation of letters and the arts of peace; to redeem them from the hands of the old women and children, who have the field to themselves. The undigested mass of new thoughts and words will become digested and assimilated by skill and labour-and other Popes and Addisons will arise to chasten, harmonize, and simplify, to clear and purify the well of" English undefiled."

But we must return to our intent. It was, so far, our object to fix the general state of literature, from which alone all particular views can be justly comprehended; and we were also desirous to make it appear that we do not lay too much stress on causes exclusively local. Our literature is that of England we are substantially English in name, laws, and prospects. We have had the full benefit of the literature of England, and must partake of its changes. The effects we have been noticing can be traced here also. Not among our publishers or book marts--for these we have not had but in our social circles and public institutions. Like our intellectual nurse, our social and forensic tones are changed from what they were. An apathy of taste reigns, attributable to the same causes, which lay like a leaden spell upon the British world. A spirit of utilities governs the tongue and pen with its untrimmed and feeble, though full and useful style-its naked details, and diffuse but unprincipled reasonings. Wit and classic allusion have long ceased to throw their graceful and fascinating lustre over the intercourse and conduct of public men. The time has passed when a moral axiom was thought important enough to be gravely bundied between the bench and the bar;

but when wit was carried to perfection; when deep and leading truths were expressed with the strength and power of dignified simplicity, and when a chaste and pointed precision of style gave evidence to the reigning spirit from which they came. Though, properly speaking, we have had no literature; yet such was the pervading influence of the day of Flood and Grattan, and their cotemporaries, which not only ruled the listening senate, or gave attraction to the popular pamphlet, but pervaded domestic life.

No literature had yet taken root in Ireland, except a trifling and occasiona. appearance of pamphlets, which, from their uniformly specific purpose, were confined to shed their glow-worm radiance on trivial points of local or ephemeral interest The spirit of the time did not favour the colonization of literature into Ireland; it was not in such a state of circumstances that it might be expected to begin; for such is the consideration important to be kept in view.

But there was another very pecu liar process going on in Ireland to corrupt the taste and partially to obscure our national reputation.— The public speaker, as will ever be the case, found it necessary to accommodate his style to its purposes :- - and the peculiar state of the country called forth a style of rhetoric, adapted to please the most uncultivated ear and understanding. Clouds of sublimated nonsense,—" the melancholy madness of poetry”—drew thunders of applause from listening streets. The miserable cant of a barbaric patriotism was tricked out in the waste of poetical commonplaces, and adorned with the meretricious tinsel of extravagant conceits and metaphors, which seemed to have sense and propriety, because they were not understood:-real talent set off, and occasionally redeemed this sad degeneracy-Sheil and O'Connell could not be without meaning; but their followers and admirers made sad work. For a moment popular admiration was made an argument in behalf of the extravagances by which it was won. But this could not last; the Edinburgh Review broke the spell, and Irish eloquence fell in the market. Such demonstrations could do little to excite the better portion of our mind.

Let us now briefly notice the operation of this state of things on the populace of Ireland. It is not more