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say that we think it has been hardly dealt by, very unfairly examined, very unjustly judged, and very ignorantly sentenced. We have taken occasion, in another place, to speak of the critical and poetical sentiments as rarely combined, and as affording, in most instances where they are assumed, very natural exhibitions of a want of sympathy. We have seen cases which may be called extremely hard ones, in this particular. The court in which they were tried had no title to its jurisdiction drawn from any portion of any healthy literary charter whatever, or from common sense itself; yet prosaic, unimaginative, and unlearned as it was, it presumed to sit upon the matter it had irreverently brought to its tribunal, with all the circumstance and pretension with which it would pass upon subjects to which it might lay some claim of knowledge and authority. No one will deny that this is a highly dangerous proceeding in the business of criticism. It is dangerous as regards both the writer and the reviewer; for the former may be made bitter by the harsh and undeserved judgment to which he is subjected; or on the other hand expanded beyond all rational dimensions by the flattery with which he is dismissed; while the latter is sure to render himself eminently ridiculous by his criticism in the minds of all whose literary judgment is untrammeled.

But let us pass from this to a few closing considerations suggested by our still expanding subject. Poetry has seen times of greater veneration, indeed, than our own. Time was when its votary was all but deified. The oaken crowns of Homer and Virgil proved the enthusiastic worship of their countrymen. But it was the worship of a listening and excited, not of a reading and thinking people. They were triumphs indeed that Racine and Voltaire could boast, when theatres rose up to them, and welcomed them as the poetic fathers of their country. It was high honour that encircled Petrarca, thought of as divine in his shadowy Vaucluse, and received as divine amidst the plaudits of all Italy. It was a proud thing for Tasso to be set apart to be crowned with laurel at the Capitol, in the midst of popes and prelates and cardinals. Yet the fame of the blind bard of the isles was not full, till temples and statues rose upon his ashes, and cities contended for the honour of his birth-place. The Latin poet commanded an admiration that derived its chief glory from the patronage and power of Augustus. The Euripides of France enjoyed a literary renown as great as a taste so decidedly national would admit, while the poet was torn between the struggles of his great genius and the tyranny of court criticism. Petrarch retains, in many of our recollections, but a romantic celebrity; and it is not the honours rendered, nor yet the coronation decreed him, that can blind us to the

[June, belief, that, in poetry, the highest moral elevation was not reached even by Tasso the Repentant.1

Though the art, then, and its successful and commanding votaries, may find that the period of their more peculiar and unqualified veneration has passed by, they need indulge no apprehensions about the destruction or decay of the principle of their influence. That principle is imperishable. It is founded as deeply and as securely as human nature itself. It appeals to feelings and sympathies that are born with us, and that us to the grave. We cannot escape from its power if we with go would. It stirs the heart like music, and finds its response as unfailing as its pulsations. Those instances of submission to its enchantment, and of honour paid to its supremacy, to which we have adverted, though not repeated to the eye in this our day, are still no strange tribute in the spirit-land of sympathetic and uncorrupted natures.

In this wholesome and honourable consciousness, then, let the poet find his unfailing satisfaction. His is a high duty; for he strikes his harp for the world-for the benefit as well as delight of his fellows, with whom he mingles on the broad pathway of life. His, too, is a high reward; for he finds it in the applause of the good and great, who render it to his genius in a still more unqualified strain, where the brilliancy of the poet is rendered yet brighter by the worth of the man. Such duty and such reward are surely better than those of an earlier, though perhaps a more romantic age, and surely the best, disconnected with his art, which can await him on the common journey; and though to the mighty masters of a more enthusiastic but less enlightened period, the tribute of praise was rendered with more direct and almost royal manifestations, the regard with which the writer, of true poetic power--of the true inspiration, is now met by an admiring people-a whole landthe world, may well be deemed equivalent to the best admiration of which genius has been the recipient on its most triumphant way.

"Il fut reçu dans l'académie des Aetherei de Padoue sous le nom de Pentito, du Repentant, pour marquer, qu'il se repentait du temps qu'il croyait avoir perdu dans l'étude du droit, et dans les autres, ou son inclination ne l'avait pas appelé.-Voltaire: Essai sur le Poesie epique. Le Tasse.

ART. II.--Memoires biographiques, litteraires et politiques de MIRABEAU; écrits par lui même ; par son frère; son oncle ; et son fils adoptif. 8 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1834-6.

Eloquence, like poetry, seems a natural gift, and not an acquired talent. Efficiency, and even superiority, may be attained in both, without decided genius; though no one will rise, by mere labour, to the highest development of the powers and resources of these arts, without some talent greater than the acquired. Cicero, with that true fidelity and affection which every one feels for the means of his elevation, ranks elequence as the first of the arts; and, without acceding to this opinion in its full extent, but making some allowance for prejudice and vanity, it cannot be denied that it is a very great possession-a tremendous instrument for talent to hold, and one of the highest and noblest attainments the human mind can reach, or to which human genius can aspire. It is then no condescension, with the greatest mind, if it lie within the direction of its pursuits and purposes, to attempt, if nature is deficient, the increase of its resources, by adding the accomplishment of oratory. Still there can be no doubt that the elements of eloquence are gifts of nature; that it is a peculiar and uncommon power; that the different faculties which are required in its creation, seldom meet in one individual, and are beyond the reach of most men, even in the humblest degree. The great Roman orator says, with some exultation, see how many mathematicians there are-how many poets-how many distinguished in every department of knowledge--but how few orators; and the assertion appears as true as it is forcible. It is borne out by the history of nations. Whether it is the creature of circumstance, a mere accident of intellect, or the production of a highly cultivated condition of society, or.to whatever cause our speculations may extend, the fact appears to be, that a great orator is a very infrequent and extraordinary event.

Multo tamen pauciores oratores, quam poetæ boni reperientur, which, as it is true, elevates oratory to a higher place than is usually assigned to it; though it does not depress, at the same time, its noble sister art. Greece, in the midst of her refinement, through all the struggles of ambition, with all her magnificent attainments in every department in which the human intellect has excelled or can excel--in the beauty and perfection of her philosophy-her political changes and convulsions--her freedom--and with a people of the most apt and acute genius, and possessing every other attribute that has made her the admiration of ages--had, or has left, but few orators. There was every variety of incident in her career to

call forth all the various powers of mind--all those hues of hope, and shades of depression, that excite and gladden, or try the firmness and energies of the soul. Nothing was wanting, in her character or condition, to aid and exalt every display of intellect, and nurture into greatness every aspirant for fame. Yet she had but one great orator; though, indeed, one whose existence is an era, and whose name stands as the emblem of perfection in his art; whose glory not only surpasses, but overshadows and consumes the merit of every contemporary, and has come down to the present time with the brilliancy of fame and vivid reality, which belong to a living power. The great rival of Greece had but two of high reputation, and only one of the first order. This certainly bears out Cicero, and proves that the gift of eloquence is seldom granted; or that there are difficulties to contend with, in its attainment, that are insuperable to most minds. Like most things in which the highest efforts of intellect are concerned, there must be, to develope them fully, a correspondence between the moral, mental and political condition of society; or, in other words, the highest degree of civilization is, if not essential, still extremely important in bringing out the refinements of art. An individual of extraordinary genius, governed by that irrepressible instinct that leads him on in pursuit of the object he is best fitted to attain, may succeed in his design. He does it in defiance of society, in defiance of all the obstacles of a rude age or personal circumstances. He acts not through his will, but by an impulse of nature, to which his will is obedient. He is in so far an inspired person--one who is beyond the common relations of men, and forms no example of the necessity or the value of an improved social state, in drawing forth and shaping the objects and aspirations of intellect. Great minds do not, to all appearance, come when they are the most wanted. They visit the earth at times when their whole career must be a struggle; when the difficulties they must surmount, task all their powers; when the conflict is not only with those external influences that are strong, but with their effects, that control and overlay every energy. They must war not only with the prejudices of others, but with their own; hold a contest, hand to hand, not with the peculiar feelings alone that society regards as its great defences, but with all the corruptions with which time and ignorance incrust it, and, what is still more painful, and demands still greater exertion, with all those impressions that are found associated with every movement and every emotion of the individual's own heart and faculties. A mind that conquers such difficulties, and issues from so desperate a struggle, not only victorious, but with its character stamped indelibly on the age, and affecting those which succeed it, is not to be brought within

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or judged by common rules. He sets forth his own decrees: he executes his own judgments. The world is guided by him, and not he by the world. There is no mutual relation between him and society; no influence on the one side-no dependence on the other. It is difficult, then, to say how far such a man might be injured or improved by living in times of more refinement; but one thing is certain, that the nature, if not the quality, of what he does, would be much affected by the circumstances in which he lives. The poet is, perhaps, the only form in which genius appears, that would be exempt from this influence: though not altogether, yet quite enough so to preserve his powers unbiassed, and his claims to originality entire. It is difficult to conceive Shakspeare, if he had lived in the age of Pericles, more extraordinary than he is, or very different. His creations would not have been more perfect, though his language might have been more polished. We should have had his humour, his knowledge of human nature, all the strength of his imagination, the brilliancy of his fancy, and acuteness of his wit, in some other shape. He would have moulded the spiritualized grandeur, that appears an attribute in the drama of Greece, into shapes as stately and lovely as any we now have, though they might have been imbued with more of the passions and sympathies of our nature. Still, it is a deep homage to pay to the strength of great genius, to suppose that even Shakspeare would not haye undergone some serious change, if he had lived in that remarkable era. The imagination rests upon it with such pleasure and amazement, that a species of awe and veneration mingles with our thoughts. There is a visionary splendour attached to that period, a halo of intellect and glory, that makes it difficult to individualize our associations, and not to elevate, into something more than mortal, the men of that time. The poet, however, is less dependent on things around him, than any other of the cultivators of intellect. He models himself by no rules; he is no part of the commonplace of society. He stands, if not aloof, still distinct, from those minor regulations which direct the thoughts of others. His movements are in a sphere of his own. He is the type of his own errors-the master and director of his own pursuits. In what way then is he likely to be affected by the conduct or condition of those minor and trifling matters which hold, but are only meant to hold in obedience inferior minds? We do not, by this, design to say that there is no reaction, even on the greatest genius, by circumstances for the fact is too evident to be denied. It is altered by them; it is withered by them; it seems to lose all sense of an independent existence, beneath the weight of the opposing opinions and counteracting laws and feelings of the position in which it is cast. Yet, we think, poetry feels these less than the VOL. XXI.-No. 42.

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