and progress of poetry, philosophy, and rebellions-is a complete history. Difthe arts. Here his work is extremely ferences of definition are logically deficient. Indeed, though it may seem unimportant; but practically they a strange thing to say of a gentleman sometimes produce the most momentous who has published so many quartos, effects. Thus it has been in the preMr. Mitford seems to entertain a feeling, sent case. Historians have, almost bordering on contempt, for literary and without exception, confined themselves speculative pursuits. The talents of to the public transactions of states, action almost exclusively attract his and have left to the negligent adminisnotice; and he talks with very compla- tration of writers of fiction a province cent disdain of "the idle learned.' at least equally extensive and valuable. Homer, indeed, he admires; but principally, I am afraid, because he is convinced that Homer could neither read nor write. He could not avoid speaking of Socrates; but he has been far more solicitous to trace his death to political causes, and to deduce from it consequences unfavourable to Athens, and to popular governments, than to throw light on the character and doctrines of the wonderful man, "From whose mouth issued forth All wise statesmen have agreed to consider the prosperity or adversity of nations as made up of the happiness or misery of individuals, and to reject as chimerical all notions of a public interest of the community, distinct from the interest of the component parts. It is therefore strange that those whose office it is to supply statesmen with examples and warnings should omit, as too mean for the dignity of history, circumstances which exert the most Mellifluous streams that watered all the extensive influence on the state of so schools Of Academics, old and new, with those He does not seem to be aware that Demosthenes was a great orator; he represents him sometimes as an aspiring demagogue, sometimes as an adroit negotiator, and always as a great rogue. But that in which the Athenian excelled all men of all ages, that irresistible eloquence, which at the distance of more than two thousand years stirs our blood, and brings tears into our eyes, he passes by with a few phrases of common-place commendation. The origin of the drama, the doctrines of the sophists, the course of Athenian education, the state of the arts and sciences, the whole domestic system of the Greeks, he has almost completely neglected. Yet these things will appear, to a reflecting man, scarcely less worthy of attention than the taking of Sphacteria or the discipline of the targeteers of Iphicrates. ciety. In general, the under current of human life flows steadily on, unruffled by the storms which agitate the surface. The happiness of the many commonly depends on causes independent of victories or defeats, of revolutions or restorations,-causes which can be regulated by no laws, and which are recorded in no archives. These causes are the things which it is of main importance to us to know, not how the Lacedæmonian phalanx was broken at Leuctra,--not whether Alexander died of poison or by disease. History, without these, is a shell without a kernel; and such is almost all the history which is extant in the world. Paltry skirmishes and plots are reported with absurd and useless minuteness; but improvements the most essential to the comfort of human life extend themselves over the world, and introduce themselves into every cottage, before any annalist can condescend, from the dignity of writing about generals and ambassadors, to take the least notice of This, indeed, is a deficiency by no them. Thus the progress of the most means peculiar to Mr. Mitford. Most salutary inventions and discoveries is people seem to imagine that a detail of buried in impenetrable mystery; manpublic occurrences-the operations of kind are deprived of a most useful sieges the changes of administrations species of knowledge, and their bene-the treaties-the conspiracies-the factors of their hone: t fame. In the and elegance of expression, which characterise the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; but what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero; the withering fire of Juvenal; the plastic imagination of Dante; the humour of Cervantes; the comprehension of Bacon; the wit of Butler; the supreme and universal excellence of Shakspeare? All the triumphs of truth and genius over pre meantime every child knows by heart the dates and adventures of a long line of barbarian kings. The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical. Thucydides, as far as he goes, is an excellent writer; yet he affords us far less knowledge of the most important particulars relating to Athens than Plato or Aristophanes. The little treatise of Xenophon on Domestic Economy contains more historical information than all the seven books of his Hellenics. The same may be said of the Satires of Horace, of the Letters of Cicero, of the novels of Le Sage, of the memoirs of Marmontel. Many judice and power, in every country and others might be mentioned; but these sufficiently illustrate my meaning. in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great I would hope that there may yet minds have made a stand against vioappear a writer who may despise the lence and fraud, in the cause of liberty present narrow limits, and assert the and reason, there has been her spirit in rights of history over every part of her the midst of them; inspiring, encounatural domain. Should such a writer raging, consoling ;-by the lonely lamp engage in that enterprise, in which I of Erasmus; by the restless bed of cannot but consider Mr. Mitford as Pascal; in the tribune of Mirabeau ; in having failed, he will record, indeed, the cell of Galileo; on the scaffold of all that is interesting and important in Sidney. But who shall estimate her military and political transactions; influence on private happiness? Who but he will not think anything too tri- shall say how many thousands have val for the gravity of history which is been made wiser, happier, and better, not too trival to promote or diminish by those pursuits in which she has the happiness of man. He will por- taught mankind to engage: to how tray in vivid colours the domestic many the studies which took their rise society, the manners, the amusements, from her have been wealth in poverty, the conversation of the Greeks. He-liberty in bondage,-health in sickwill not disdain to discuss the state of ness, society in solitude? Her power agriculture, of the mechanical arts, and is indeed manifested at the bar, in the of the conveniences of life. The pro- senate, in the field of battle, in the gress of painting, of sculpture, and of schools of philosophy. But these are architecture, will form an important not her glory. Wherever literature part of his plan. But, above all, his consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,-attention will be given to the history of wherever it brings gladness to eyes that splendid literature from which has which fail with wakefulness and tears, sprung all the strength, the wisdom, and ache for the dark house and the the freedom, and the glory, of the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its western world. noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens. Of the indifference which Mr. Mitford shows on this subject I will not The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did speak; for I cannot speak with fairness. not hesitate to abandon to his comIt is a subject on which I love to for- rade the camels with their load of get the accuracy of a judge, in the jewels and gold, while he retained the veneration of a worshipper and the casket of that mysterious juice which gratitude of a child. If we consider enabled him to behold at one glance all merely the subtlety of disquisition, the the hidden riches of the universe. force of imagination, the perfect energy | Surely it is no exaggeration to say that G. no external advantage is to be com- | knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall in vain labour to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chaunted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts ;her influence and her glory will still survive,-fresh in eternal youth, ex pared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to, the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotch-empt from mutability and decay, immen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilisation and ; mortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control. 83 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. JOHN DRYDEN. (JANUARY 1828.) | and invectives which represent indi The Poetical Works of JOHN DRYDEN. In 2 vols. University Edition. London, 1826. THE public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the second rank of our poets,-no mean station in a table of intellectual precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of the few who were his superiors in genius, none has exercised a more extensive or permanent influence on the national habits of thought and expression. His life was commensurate with the period during which a great revolution in the public taste was effected; and in that revolution he played the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the lead in its wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it. By trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By signalising himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He commenced his career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated it in the repose of established sovereignty, -the author of a new code, the root of a new dynasty. Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who has been distinguished either in the literary or in the political world, it may be said that the course which he pursued, and the effect which he produced, depended less on his personal qualities than on the circumstances in which he was placed. Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics tellectual revolutions, subverting estabviduals as effecting great moral and inlished systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern Rome the canonisation of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore. By a law of association, from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, although there may be no person to whom our misery or our happiness can be ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents itself even on those who alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man elated by success often displays itself towards enemies. In the same manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where they do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of Egyptian idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles-Sacheverells and Wilkeses. They even fall prostrate before a deity to which they have themselves given the form which commands their veneration, and which, unless fashioned by them, would have remained a shapeless block. They persuade themselves that they are the creatures of what they have themselves created. For, in fact, it is the age that forms | neither of them had ever existed, the the man, not the man that forms the principle must inevitably have occurred age. Great minds do indeed re-act on to some person within a few years. So the society which has made them what in our own time the doctrine of rent, they are; but they only pay with in- now universally received by political terest what they have received. We economists, was propounded, almost at extol Bacon, and sneer at Aquinas. But, the same moment, by two writers unif their situations had been changed, connected with each other. Preceding Bacon might have been the Angelical speculators had long been blundering Doctor, the most subtle Aristotelian of round about it; and it could not posthe schools; the Dominican might have sibly have been missed much longer by led forth the sciences from their house the most heedless inquirer. We are inof bondage. If Luther had been born clined to think that, with respect to every in the tenth century, he would have great addition which has been made to effected no reformation. If he had the stock of human knowledge, the case never been born at all, it is evident that has been similar; that without Copernithe sixteenth century could not have cus we should have been Copernicans,elapsed without a great schism in the that without Columbus America would church. Voltaire, in the days of Louis have been discovered, that without the Fourteenth, would probably have Locke we should have possessed a just been, like most of the literary men of theory of the origin of human ideas. that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent Society indeed has its great men and among the defenders of efficacious grace, its little men, as the earth has its mouna bitter assailant of the lax morality of tains and its valleys. But the inequalithe Jesuits and the unreasonable deci- ties of intellect, like the inequalities of sions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal had the surface of our globe, bear so small entered on his literary career when in- a proportion to the mass, that, in calcutelligence was more general, and abuses lating its great revolutions, they may at the same time more flagrant, when safely be neglected. The sun illumithe church was polluted by the Iscariot nates the hills, while it is still below Dubois, the court disgraced by the or- the horizon; and truth is discovered by gies of Canillac, and the nation sacri- the highest minds a little before it beficed to the juggles of Law, if he had comes manifest to the multitude. This lived to see a dynasty of harlots, an is the extent of their superiority. They empty treasury and a crowded harem, are the first to catch and reflect a light, an army formidable only to those whom which, without their assistance, must, it should have protected, a priesthood in a short time, be visible to those who just religious enough to be intolerant, lie far beneath them. 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 authority-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 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. The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been produced |