"Little more worth remembering occurre during the play, at the end of which Jones aske him which of the players he liked best. To this he answered, with some appearance of in. dignation at the question, the King, without doubt.'-'Indeed, Mr. Partridge,' says Mrs. Miller, 'you are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed that Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage.'-'He the best player!' cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; 'why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, behe acted so fine, why, any man, that is any good man, that had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I never was at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country, and the King for my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, and half as loud again as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.""

In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad theatrical critic. Bul

cesca starting at the tremulous kies, and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We believe that they admired these things less than ourselves, but that they felt them more. We should perhaps say, that they felt them too much to admire them. The progress of a nation from barbarism to civilization produces a change similar to that which takes place during the progress of an individual from infancy to matare age. What man does not remember with regret the first time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable to appreciate the powers of the writer; or rather, he neither knew nor cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably thought it not half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-tween him and his mother, where you told me browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strinadona. He now values Fingal and Temora only as showing with how little evidence a story may be believed, and with how little merit a book may be popular. Of the romance of Defoe he entertains the highest opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand touches, which formerly he passed by without notice. But though he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly, he is far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mut-none of those who laugh at him possess the ton sail, and the canoe which could not be tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. brought down to the water's edge, the tent with He admires in the wrong place; but he trem its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and bles in the right place. It is indeed because he the den where the old goat died, can never is so much excited by the acting of Garrick, again be to him the realities which they were. that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthThe days when his favourite volume set him ing performer, who personates the King. So, upon making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon we have heard it said, that in some parts of digging caves and fencing huts in the garden, Spain and Portugal, an actor who should recan never return. Such is the law of our na- present a depraved character finely, instead of ture. Our judgment ripens, our imagination calling down the applauses of the audience, is decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers hissed and pelted without mercy. It would be of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the same in England, if we, for one moment, the pleasures of close investigation and those thought that Shylock or Iago was standing beof agreeable error. We cannot sit at once in fore us. While the dramatic art was in its the front of the stage and behind the scenes. infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects We cannot be under the illusion of the specta- on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is cle, while we are watching the movements of said that they blamed Eschylus for frightening the ropes and pulleys which dispose it. them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells us, that when Phrynichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a penalty of a thousand drachmas, for torturing their feelings by so pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist, but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the distressing illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have treated a messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming tidings, which turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child screams with terror at the sight of a person in an ugly mask. He has perhaps seen the mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his reason, and he entreats that it may be taken off.

The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of Partridge at the theatre, affords so complete an illustration of our proposition, that we cannot refrain from quoting some parts of it. Partridge gave that credit to Mr. Garrick which he had denied to Jones, and fell into so violent a trembling that his knees knocked against each other. Jones asked him what was the matter, and whether he was afraid of the warrior upon the stage?' O, la, sir,' said ne, 'I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not afraid of any thing, for I know it is but a play; and if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance and in so much company; and yet if I was frightened, I am not the only person.'-'Why, who,' cries Jones, 'dost thou take to be such a coward here besides thyself?''Nay, you may call me a coward if you will; but if that little man there upon the stage is not frightened, I never saw any man frightened in my life.' ... He sat with his eyes fixed partly on the Ghost and partly on Hamlet, and with his mouth open; the same passions which succeeded each other in Hamlet. succeeded likewise in him.

We should act in the same manner, if the grief and horror produced in us by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But in us these emotions are comparatively languid. They rarely affect our appetite or our sleep. They leave us sufficiently at ease to trace them to their causes, and to estimate the powers which produce them. Our attention is speedil iverted from the images which cal

in the pangs of death, when he thought of the mead of Valhalla.

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 nave 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 undoubt. composition. 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 our own sensations. Thus, the Arab, :truments which the imagination employs. when covered with wounds, saw nothing bu. 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 to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to 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 Yet the effect of these early performances, something compared with which the High- imperfect as they must necessarily be, is im lander at the door of the snuff-shop would de- mense. All deficiencies are to be supplied serve admiration. If an uninitiated Raphael by the susceptibility of those to whom they are were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere addressed. We all know what pleasure a daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say, that the wooden doll, which may be bought for six. ear y works of Raphael are little better. Yet, pence, will afford to a little girl. She will rewho 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 concep

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are brought to perfec tion. 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 con summate 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 adven In 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, ali 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 xist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which

tions to others.

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

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. Poet men think as they trade, not in kind, but by ry has a partial revival, a St. Martin's Sum means 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. Buch 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 as these. But criticism is still in a very imperfect state. What is accidental is for a long time confounded with what is essential. Geheral theories are drawn from detached facts. How many hours the action of a play may be allowed to occupy-how many similes an epic poet may introduce into his first book-whether a piece which is acknowledged to have a beginning and end may not be without a middle, and other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the attention of men of letters 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 fashiond. From outrageous absurdity they are preerved 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, Aus at best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer to exactness. The merits of the

In

The history of every literature with which we are acquainted confirms, we think, the principles which we have laid down. Greece we see the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading into the critical. Eschylus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles; Sophocles by Euripides; Euripides by the Alexandrian versifiers. Of these last, Theocritus alone has left compositions which deserve to be read. The splendid and grotesque fairy-land of the Old Comedy, rich with such gorgeous hues, peopled with such fantastic 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 pc.nt at which their masters had in the course of many gene rations arrived. They thus almost wholly missed the period of original invention. The only Latin poets whose writings exhibit much

vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Ca- | cious, was utterly unconscious of their value, ullus. The Augustan age produced nothing equal to their finer passages.

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 writers as decorous and as tiresome as gentlemen-ledge is extended, and as the reason developes ashers.

ness. Most of the characters of the French | terval between the age of sublime invention stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies and that of agreeable imitation. The works 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.

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 .atter 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.

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 versification— without the powers of an earlier or the correctness of a later age—was left to enjoy un disputed ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness to perceive resemblances and analogies between things apparently hete rogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration. Suckling was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and theological contro

But the Puritans drove imagination from its The excellence of these works is in a great last asylum. They prohibited theatrical repremeasure the result of two peculiarities, which sentations, and stigmatized the whole race of the critics of the French school consider as dramatists as enemies of morality and relidefects-from the mixture of tragedy and co-gion. Much that is objectionable may be found medy, 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 fiction, 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 neen kept alive by the drama till is place could, in some degree, be supplied by tastewhat 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 revolutions 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 suck 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 thar stupendous work, the English Bible—a book which, if every thing else in our language should perish, would alone suffice tow the