successful chief becomes a king; his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions, and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first 5 duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.

The first rude

Poetry is thus in its origin panegyrical. 10 songs of all nations appear to be a sort of brief historical notices, in a strain of tumid hyperbole, of the exploits and possessions of a few pre-eminent individuals. They tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many 15 widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the 20 sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.

This is the first stage of poetry before the invention of written letters. The numerical modulation is at once useful as a help to memory, and pleasant to the ears of uncultured 25 men, who are easily caught by sound; and, from the exceeding flexibility of the yet unformed language, the poet does no violence to his ideas in subjecting them to the fetters of number. The savage, indeed, lisps in numbers, and all rude and uncivilized people express themselves in the manner 30 which we call poetical.

The scenery by which he is surrounded, and the superstitions which are the creed of his age, form the poet's mind. Rocks, mountains, seas, unsubdued forests, unnavigable rivers, surround him with forms of power and mystery, which 35 ignorance and fear have peopled with spirits, under multifarious names of gods, goddesses, nymphs, genii, and dæmons. Of all these personages marvelous tales are in existence: the nymphs are not indifferent to handsome young men, and the gentlemen-genii are much troubled and very troublesome

with a propensity to be rude to pretty maidens; the bard, therefore, finds no difficulty in tracing the genealogy of his chief to any of the deities in his neighborhood with whom the said chief may be desirous of claiming relationship.

ΙΟ

In this pursuit, as in all others, some, of course, will attain 5 a very marked pre-eminence; and these will be held in high honor, like Demodocus in the Odyssey, and will be consequently inflated with boundless vanity, like Thamyris in the Iliad. Poets are as yet the only historians and chroniclers of their time, and the sole depositories of all 11 the knowledge of their age; and though this knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional fantasies than a collection of useful truths, yet, such as it is, they have it to themselves. They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and fighting; and though their object be nothing more than to 15 secure a share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not by physical power; their success excites emulation to the attainment of intellectual eminence; thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken those of others, at the same time that they gratify vanity and amuse curiosity. 20 A skilful display of the little knowledge they have gains them credit for the possession of much more which they have not. Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of inspiration; thus they are not only historians, but theolo- 25 gians, moralists, and legislators; delivering their oracles ex cathedra [from the chair of authority], and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity; building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony -- which are only metaphors 30 for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.

The golden age of poetry finds its materials in the age

of

iron. This age begins when poetry begins to be retrospective; when something like a more extended system of civil polity is established; when personal strength and courage 35 avail less to the aggrandizing of their possessor, and to the making and marring of kings and kingdoms, and are checked by organized bodies, social institutions, and hereditary successions. Men also live more in the light of truth and within

the interchange of observation, and thus perceive that the agency of gods and genii is not so frequent among themselves as, to judge from the songs and legends of the past time, it was among their ancestors. From these two circum5 stances really diminished personal power, and apparently diminished familiarity with gods and genii - they very easily and naturally deduce two conclusions: 1st, That men are degenerated, and 2nd, That they are less in favor with the gods. The people of the petty states and colonies, which 10 have now acquired stability and form, which owed their origin and first prosperity to the talents and courage of a single chief, magnify their founder through the mists of distance and tradition, and perceive him achieving wonders with a god or goddess always at his elbow. They find his name 15 and his exploits thus magnified and accompanied in their traditionary songs, which are their only memorials. All that is said of him is in this character. There is nothing to contradict it. The man and his exploits and his tutelary deities are mixed and blended in one invariable association. The 20 marvelous, too, is very much like a snowball: it grows as it rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth, which began its descent from the summit, is hidden in the accumulation of superinduced hyperbole.

When tradition, thus adorned and exaggerated, has sur25 rounded the founders of families and states with so much adventitious power and magnificence, there is no praise which a living poet can, without fear of being kicked for clumsy flattery, address to a living chief, that will not still leave the impression that the latter is not so great a man as 30 his ancestors. The man must, in this case, be praised through his ancestors. Their greatness must be established, and he must be shown to be their worthy descendant. All the people of a state are interested in the founder of their state. All states that have harmonized into a common form 35 of society are interested in their respective founders. AN men are interested in their ancestors. All men love to look back into the days that are past. In these circumstances traditional national poetry is reconstructed, and brought, like chaos, into order and form. The interest is more universal;

This is the

understanding is enlarged: passion still has scope and play; character is still various and strong; nature is still unsubdued and existing in all her beauty and magnificence, and men are not yet excluded from her observation by the magnitude of cities, or the daily confinement of civic life; poetry 5 is more an art; it requires greater skill in numbers, greater command of language, more extensive and various knowledge, and greater comprehensiveness of mind. It still exists without rivals in any other department of literature; and even the arts, painting and sculpture certainly, and music probably, 10 are comparatively rude and imperfect. The whole field of intellect is its own. It has no rivals in history, nor in philosophy, nor in science. It is cultivated by the greatest intellects of the age, and listened to by all the rest. age of Homer, the golden age of poetry. Poetry has now 15 attained its perfection; it has attained the point which it cannot pass; genius therefore seeks new forms for the treatment of the same subjects; hence the lyric poetry of Pindar and Alcæus, and the tragic poetry of Æschylus and Sophocles. The favor of kings, the honor of the Olympic crown, the 20 applause of present multitudes, all that can feed vanity and stimulate rivalry, await the successful cultivator of this art, till its forms become exhausted, and new rivals arise around it in new fields of literature, which gradually acquire more influence as, with the progress of reason and civilization, 25 facts become more interesting than fiction; indeed, the maturity of poetry may be considered the infancy of history. The transition from Homer to Herodotus is scarcely more remarkable than that from Herodotus to Thucydides, in the gradual dereliction of fabulous incident and ornamented lan- 30 guage. Herodotus is as much a poet in relation to Thucydides as Homer is in relation to Herodotus. The history of Herodotus is half a poem; it was written while the whole field of literature yet belonged to the Muses, and the nine books of which it was composed were therefore of right, as 35 well as of courtesy, superinscribed with their nine names.

Speculations, too, and disputes, on the nature of man and of mind, on moral duties and on good and evil, on the animate and inanimate components of the visible world, begin to

share attention with the eggs of Leda and the horns of Io, and to draw off from poetry a portion of its once undivided audience.

Then comes the silver age, or the poetry of civilized life. 5 This poetry is of two kinds, imitative and original. The imitative consists in recasting, and giving an exquisite polish to, the poetry of the age of gold; of this Virgil is the most obvious and striking example. The original is chiefly comic, didactic, or satiric, as in Menander, Aristophanes, Horace, 10 and Juvenal. The poetry of this age is characterized by an exquisite and fastidious selection of words, and a labor-d and somewhat monotonous harmony of expression; but its monotony consists in this, that experience having exhausted all the varieties of modulation, the civilized poetry selects the 15 most beautiful, and prefers the repetition of these to ranging through the variety of all. But the best expression being that into which the idea naturally falls, it requires the utmost labor and care so to reconcile the inflexibility of civilized language and the labored polish of versification with the idea 20 intended to be expressed, that sense may not appear to be sacrificed to sound. Hence numerous efforts and rare success.

This state of poetry is, however, a step towards its extinction. Feeling and passion are best painted in, and roused by, ornamental and figurative language; but the reason and 25 the understanding are best addressed in the simplest and most unvarnished phrase. Pure reason and dispassionate truth would be perfectly ridiculous in verse, as we may judge by versifying one of Euclid's demonstrations. This will be found true of all dispassionate reasoning whatever, and of 3o all reasoning that requires comprehensive views and enlarged combinations. It is only the more tangible points of morality, those which command assent at once, those which have a mirror in every mind, and in which the severity of reason is warmed and rendered palatable by being mixed up with 35 feeling and imagination, that are applicable even to what is called moral poetry; and as the sciences of morals and of mind advance towards perfection, as they become more enlarged and comprehensive in their views, as reason gains the ascendancy in them over imagination and feeling, poetry