natural, but there would have been no fancy in that-and this, it seems, was a case for fancy! even in sober reasoning, the French are too apt to take a figure of speech for an argument; to assume similitude upon too slight grounds, and then to confound this similitude with identity. Even in science, the common language is more figurative in France than in England, and less vigour, both of thought and of expression, is by them deemed necessary in those very branches the perfection of which depends upon the accuracy of language. Neither is this precipitancy confined to their thoughts alone; it influences their most serious actions: and they are always ready to enter into any project which promises fair to fancy without reflecting upon its real probability or advantages. As a Frenchman once said, "C'est toujours l'impossible qu'il faut demander au Français et il l'exécutera." They treat the great affairs of life, in short, with levity, the smaller concerns with importance. On the other hand, there are cases in which a little more imagination would be acceptable; and the most remarkable of these perhaps is the subject of our present consideration, Poetry. Of all the nations of the globe, ancient and modern, Hebrews, Hindoos, Greeks, Romans, Scandinavians, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, English, there is not one that, having any poetry at all, does not surpass the French in strength, originality, sublimity, invention-in a word, in all the qualities which are dependent upon reach and grandeur of imagination. But, if this faculty were as abundant among them as they pretend, should we not find it bursting out in poetry, rather than in things which are essentially under the dominion of sound judgment and common sense; in epic poems rather than in declarations of the rights of man; in dithyrambic odes, rather than in election laws; among dramatic authors rather than deliberative assemblies? In France, however, the place of these faculties seems long to have been confounded, and this dislocation of their imagination is produced as a proof of its actual strength and abundance! In what other country would a national academy propose the institution of Jury Trial as the subject of a prize poem in the nineteenth century?

Upon the delicate chapter of Taste we have but little to say, after what we have already ventured to remark as to their contempt for nature, and the way in which they have treated the landscape and the costumi of their country. In sculpture, and in music, their taste has always been pitiable; and though their country has given birth to some admirable painters, they have always been formed and generally resided abroad-while, for nearly a century, the race appears to have been extinct. To make amends, however, we do not mean to deny, that they have a good taste in millinery, in jewellery, in ornamental furniture, in fireworks, processions, dances, ceremonies, and grand entertainments-that is to say, in all things that belong to parade, rather than passion, or to the gratification of vanity, rather than the suggestion of lofty emotion. In all the nobler arts, we deny that their taste is respectable.

The last characteristic of French poetry we shall mention is that which it derives from the defects of the language: and here we do not allude so much to its want of sonorousness or melody, as to the poorness of its idiom, and the unpoetical character of the metaphors which enter into its struc

ture.

Languages, though they at last re-act upon the intellects of those who use them, were originally formed by men, and always bear the impress of the spirit from which they proceeded. Among an ardent and maginative people, the commonest expressions savour of passion and of

fancy, and the idiom itself breathes of poetry. In a colder and more courtly tribe, it takes a tinge of precision and politeness, and grows up into an apt instrument for flattery or facetiousness. It was the lot of French poetry, from the beginning, to be under the patronage of courtiers. The madrigals and ballads in which the Muse there made her essay, were composed for princesses, and sung in the courts of kings. From the time of Louis XII. there are the clearest traces of this; and the fashion was continued through the whole reign of Louis XIV. The judge whose opinion Boileau and Racine courted the most, was the monarch; and, next to him, the princes of the blood; and then, in succession, the ducs et pairs de France, and the gentlemen of his court and household. Such was their public; and the language which was not current there, could not be used in poetry! But is it not better that a thousand exuberances, nay, that some daring improprieties should occasionally disfigure speech, than that passion should be deprived of half its eloquence, or that a language should be prescribed to the soul by cold academies and heartless courts? Our neighbours, however, judge so very differently, that there are few things of which they are more vain than the courtliness of their poetical diction. Whenever a stranger happens not to feel as much rapture as they express for their poets, he is told that a foreigner cannot feel the beauties and the finesses of the French language. Now, nothing, we think can be so certain, as that the poetry, which consists chiefly in the beauties and finesses of language must be the lowest of all poetry-and the language of which the beauties are the most difficult to discover, the most unpoetical of languages. The essence of poetry consists in sentiment, passion, imagery, and the universal feelings which are dependent upon no turns of expression; and which, in whatever garb they may be disguised, are instantly recognised as the disjecta membra of the poet. How comes it, we would ask, that Homer is admired by all nations? Are there no finesses in the language of that poetical patriarch which a stranger cannot feel? Have Sophocles, Eschylus, Virgil, Horace, none of these?-or the inspired strains of the Hebrews, although they had no academy? Certainly it appears to us, that a residence of a year or two in any country, with a good will to learn its dialect, must do more to let us into these mysteries, than twice the time employed among dead authors. Neither do we conceive the French language to be so much more atticised than that of Athens, that its beauties and finesses are inscrutable to all whose first breath was not drawn in the atmosphere of Paris.

Upon those principles relating to imagination, taste, and language, the heartlessness of French poetry, and its want of originality, sublimity, invention, force, are easily explained. Twenty-seven millions of men could not be found in Europe, who, in proportion to the antiquity and the degree of their civilisation, have produced so small a number of poets,and whose poets have received so small a share of inspiration. Before Corneille, very few had given proof of strong and true genius, or have left any durable and still admired monuments of their art while, long before that period, we had poets in Britain, one of whom never was equalled, and many have not yet been excelled.

It is owing to these circumstances, we believe, and is a new proof of the truth with which they are alleged, that great poetical genius has indicated itself both among the uneducated and among the very young, much more frequently in England than in the neighbouring country. The inspiration

with us is too strong to he repressed by the want of due utterance—or, rather, the utterance which is prompted from such a source has always commanded our admiration. There, it would seem, that, to please academies, one must have studied in academies-and that no knowledge of the heart could alone for want of familiarity with the tone of good company. They have, indeed, one, Le Grand Chancel, who is famous for having written some trash called a comedy, at nine years of age-and one carpenter, Adam Billaut, who wrote vulgar verses, with some applause, in the time of Louis XIV. But what are these to our instances of Cowley, Pope, Chatterton, and Kirke White, for precocity-or SHAKSPEARE himself, Burns, Hogg, or Bloomfield, for genius, in the humblest condition? The progress of refinement with us has been so far from either repressing the feelings of the peasant, or making the polite fastidious, that it has produced just the opposite effects-as, in truth, it ought always to do.

The remarks which we have made apply to the French poetry of the two last centuries-to the only poetry, in short, which the French themselves now read, or call upon others to admire. Yet it would be unjust not to acknowledge that it was to them that all Europe was indebted for its first poetical impulse-and that the romantic literature which distinguishes the genius of modern Europe from that of classical antiquity, originated with the Trouveurs and Conteurs-the Jongleurs and Menestrels of Provence.

*

We cannot stop now to give any history of this gay science-which proceeded with such brilliant success, that a regular academy was established for its cultivation in Toulouse before the end of the 12th century, and its spirit transmitted, almost at the same time, into all the kingdoms of Europe. Sarmiento has indeed attempted to show, that this new kind of poetry, having been introduced into Spain by the Moors, first passed through Catalonia into Provence, where, meeting no doubt with singular success, it soon spread over all France, and afterwards returned by way of Toulouse to Barcelona-and thence to Andalousia, where it had begun. We do not think, however, that there is any evidence of this Moorish origin, sufficient to impeach the originality of the Provençal poets; and though it is not less true than remarkable, that, so early as the 12th century, the Romancero Gencral, and other collections, exhibit an incredible quantity of Spanish poems of the new school, yet the very name of La Gaia Ciencia, by which it is there distinguished, seems sufficiently to attest its origin; and it is recorded by Sarmiento himself, that the King of Arragon, in the 14th century, procured from the King of France two professors of poetry from Toulouse, who were settled at Barcelona, for the better encouragement of the poetical art, at that time considered of such national importance.

It would be useless, for any purpose we have now in view, to trace the progress or decline, whichever it may be called, of French poetry, from the age of the Troubadours down to that of Corneille and Racine, with whom it is supposed to have attained its perfection. It seems to have been in the reign of Louis XII., when Octavien de St. Gelais translated the Odyssey and the Epistles of Ovid, that it took a decided turn towards classical themes and models; and in the time of Henry II., Jodelle obtained such honour for his tragedies in the taste of the ancients, that he was hailed as' a second Æschylus, and presented, in the true style of academic pedantry,

Memorias para la Historia de la Poesia Espagnola. Madrid, 1775.

with a goat and garlands! The reign of Henry IV. seems to have been the most prolific of French poetry. It was then that Du Bartas published his poem on the Creation, entitled "La Première Semaine," which, it is said, went through thirty editions in six years, though no one, we suppose, has had courage to read it through for the last century. Then also flourished the most fertile of all the French poets, Hardi, who is said to have written not less than six hundred plays. We do not pretend to know much about them; but we find Lacretelle, in the true spirit of his nation, congratulating them upon the fact, which we certainly do not question, that Hardi never reached any of the fine flights of Shakspeare, since such an elevation, he observes, with his great popularity, might have prevented the French drama from asserting its present glorious analogy to that of Greece! Malherbe, who follows close on this era, brings us down at once to Racan, Meinard, and Voiture, who were the immediate precursors of Corneille.

Corneille was undoubtedly a great and original genius; and, in what we have ventured to say of the general want of nature and of genuine and varied passion in French poetry, we must not be understood as wishing to deal unjustly either by him or his illustrious successors. They were men of taste and talent unquestionably, and fine and accomplished writers in the best sense of the words; and, though we can never allow them to be beings of the same order with the great master-spirits of our own land, or fit to be set in comparison with our Shakspeares, our Miltons, our Spensers, or even our Drydens, we readily admit, that they would be bright ornaments in the literature of any country, and that they fully rival, and even outshine, some of the greatest lights of our own. The peculiarities of their notions of dramatic excellence form too large a theme to be entered upon here; we may probably take it up separately on some future occasion; but, at present, we shall merely say, that the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, are decidedly superior to any English plays that have been written in imitation of them. Boileau, we think, is at least equal to Pope in his satires, his criticisms, his imitations of the polite writers of antiquity, and the graces and pregnant brevity of his style. He was also the master and model of Pope in all these particulars, and is therefore entitled to be considered as his superior. But he could not have written the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard-nor the grander passages in the Essay on Man-nor have made such a splendid and lofty poem as Pope has of the translation of the Iliad. The task of rivalling, and perhaps excelling, that great undertaking, was reserved for De Lille. We have nothing to set against La Fontaine, the most unique, and, with the exception perhaps of Molière, the most original, of all French poets. Nor can we honestly pretend to find, in the lighter pieces of Prior, Pope, and Swift, any adequate counterpart to that great treasure of light and graceful poetry, poesies légères, which is to be found in Chaulieu, Gresset, Gentil Bernard, Dorat, Boufflers, Parny, and the more careless productions of Voltaire. In short, we are not much disposed to deny that the French poets of Louis XIV. are fully equal to the English poets of Queen Anne. But that was by no means the golden age of our poetry; on the contrary, we have always maintained, that the turn it then took to the French models was an aberration from its natural course of advancement, and, in reality, a depravation of its purity, produced by the temporary ascendancy of the foreign taste of the Court after the Restoration. It was the occasion, however, of adding an additional province to

the domain of English talent. But in less than a century this comparatively narrow district was completely occupied and explored; and, after having carried that sort of excellence which depends on purity of diction and precision and fineness of thought, to the limited height which it is ever destined to attain, the aspiring and progressive genius of our poetry fell back upon its native models of the 17th century,-where alone it could find a boundless field of adventure, and an inexhaustible harvest of glory. In France, when the same narrow limits had once been reached, in the days of Racine and Voltaire, they had no richer or sweeter models to fall back upon-no perennial springs of melodious passion and fancy in their earlier poets, to which they might recur, when the schoolboy task of classical imitation was done: but finding themselves at once at the end of their career, they had nothing for it but to declare that they had attained perfection! and that their only remaining care must be to degenerate as little as possible from the unprecedented elevation they had gained !

In this condition, accordingly, their poetry remained for the better part of a century-stationary at the best, even in the hands of Voltaire, and, since his death, confessedly declining or extinct-and fated, according to the universal creed of the nation, never, by any possibility, to advance beyond the bounds which had been assigned to it by the wits and critics of Louis XIV. The mighty agitation produced by the Revolution-the passions it set loose-the premium which it seemed to set upon talents of all descriptions and the vast additional numbers to whom it opened the career of ambition, might have been expected to break this numbing spell" upon the genius of the nation, and to have excited its poets to new topics and new flights of inspiration. Unfortunately, however, no such effect has followed. The atrocious days of the Revolution were too full of suffering and terror to allow much scope to the pleasing emotions which form the springs and the food of poetry-and, under Bonaparte, the active duties of war engrossed all the aspiring talent of the country, while the sternness of his military sway repressed all those noble and enthusiastic feelings with which the Muse might otherwise have pursued the triumphs of a free people. It is chiefly since his downfal-since the restoration of peace has forced ambitious and ardent spirits into other contentions than those of arms, and the divided state of public opinion has given exaggerated sentiments a power of inflammation that they never before possessed, that poetry has again become an object of national attention, and regained a part of its fire at least, if not of its elegance, in being made subservient to the views of contending factions.

It is chiefly in the form of dramatic pieces that the new race of poets make their appeal to the feelings or prejudices of the public-and that for very obvious reasons. The stage, indeed, has always been the favourite haunt of the French muse-partly, perhaps,, because she was conscious that the strains she inspired required all the aid of scenic pomp, graceful declamation, and the concentrated enthusiasm of assembled multitudesbut chiefly, we believe, because no French author who can possibly obtain it, will ever forego the delight of hearing himself declaimed before a crowded audience, and inhaling, in his own proper person, the intoxicating vapours of his glory, warm as they rise from the hearts and voices of his admirers. In the present situation of the country, however, there are strong additional reasons for this predilection. At Paris, the stage has always been the mouthpiece of popular feeling and every allusion, however faint and re

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