and Event. Even Leigh Hunt, in some respects one of the very best critics of his time, recognized marks of great genius in this book, which not one educated man in fifty would pretend to understand. But he, like other poets and critics of this age, seems sometimes to entertain the notion that tranparency is shallowness, and that when a man's thoughts are enveloped in impenetrable clouds, they must necessarily be instinct with some portion of the electricity of genius. But how often the most commonplace ideas and sentiments have been concealed under a veil of mysticism! It is very true that there is a sort of clever jugglery in this deception. A man who can so invert the purpose of language as to give to simple thoughts an air of sublimity or depth, cannot be utterly contemptible in point of intellect; for words are not like the common tools of the mechanic, to be handled with dexterity by a blockhead. But this literary trickery is always absurd and reprehensible, and, though it may serve a writer's purpose to a certain extent, and for a short time, it is sure to cause him, sooner or later, to fall into neglect and oblivion. Obscurity of diction is not, however, in all cases affected. It is more frequently the result of confusion of ideas. He who thinks clearly, can always, if he will, express himself clearly. The thoughts of the most gifted philosophers are not so subtle and profound as to defy expression, nor does any writer's intellect advance so completely out of sight of his own age as to leave him in the solitude of a grandeur incomprehensible to his fellow creatures. The greatest genius of our day-let him be who he may-cannot be quite so Godlike as this. We may see his face and-live.

Though it has been admitted that the studied obscurity which confounds simple readers, and sometimes leads men who should know better into an over-estimate of the writer's capacity, is a sort of literary conjuration beyond the reach of a man utterly destitute of talent, there can be no question that to simplify the expression of subtle images and make depth of thought transparent is a task requiring infinitely nobler and higher powers. The exquisite clearness of Hume's Essays may be referred to as a proof that very profound speculations may be rendered quite intelligible even to ordinary readers, though there are people who would pronounce even these fine compositions superficial, because the meaning is naked. These Essays, though by no means to be spoken of with unqualified approbation, on other grounds, are models of transparent diction, and it is greatly to be regretted that deep thinkers in our own time should disdain to use a language which all intelligent Englishmen can read. Perhaps they are unwilling to sacrifice the enjoyment of the ignorant wonder of the vulgar, who always admire the mysticism that mocks their understanding. If certain cloudy metaphysics were rendered a little more intelligible, the critics of the day would talk less of their profundity. To eyes like theirs, an object looms largely through the thick mist, that would be contemptible in the open sunshine.

LITERARY CHIT-CHAT.

No. I.

MACAULAY AND THE POETS.

A. You have just had an interview, I hear, with Thomas Babington Macaulay-What did you think of him?

H.-In some respects he appeared the most extraordinary person I ever met with. His conversational powers are marvellous.

A. My friend J-thinks him a shallow fellow, and in his grave dull way, speaks contemptuously of him "as a mere reviewer."

H. As a mere reviewer! As if any blockhead could write a review! Such reviews, indeed, as appear in some of our literary periodicals, any body could write, who has no dislike to selfdegradation. But the criticisms in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews are generally original papers of great power, and often surpass in the same characteristic excellence the work they commend most highly and with most justice. I consider some of Macaulay's criticisms in the Edinburgh to be amongst the very finest compositions of that kind in our language. Perhaps Johnson's analysis of Dryden's powers is the Doctor's best performance, but it is quite equalled by Macaulay's brilliant and sagacious criticism on the same poet.

B

A.—I did not think you had so high an opinion of Macaulay as an author. To me he appears flippant, dogmatical, laboured— though he is not without a showy cleverness. His style is never easy and natural. He has not the art to hide his art. It is not so difficult to construct the short, snappish, independent French sentences of which he is so fond, and which are agreeable enough to vulgar readers, because they move lightly, and are unencumbered with a weight of thought. To use an illustration of Coleridge's, they have only the same connexion with each other that marbles have in a bag.

H.-It may perhaps be easy enough to compose short sentences, but it is not so easy to point them with the wit and truth of Macaulay.

A. At all events, you must grant that he is arrogant, and self-conceited.

H.-You are thinking of the man, and not of the author. I do not suppose that a reader unacquainted personally with the writer would discover these faults, and even in private intercourse Macaulay is usually courteous and polite.

A. I know not how you can say so. He left an impression on my mind that he despised every one but himself. He talks incessantly, and will hardly allow any one at his own table to wedge in a single word. He is overwhelming. He soon tires the most admiring hearer.

H.-He never tired me, either in private life or in the House of Commons, where one of his brilliant orations throws all other speakers into the shade. It is still more delightful to read than to hear them. They are so polished, so terse, and so full of close reasoning and general truths. They are the only speeches we now see in the newspapers that remind us of the eloquence of Burke. I do not mean to say that they exhibit the same fine imagination, or the same depth of philosophy or force of genius, but they have that breadth of thought and that absence of purely temporary and local detail which make Burke's speeches as readable now as the day after they were delivered.

A. All this appears to me to be very extravagant; but I

suppose we shall never agree upon the subject of Macaulay's genius. I should like, however, to know what sort of conversation you had with him at the Albany.

H.-Oh! he talked about the poets of England-the living poets and I was delighted to listen.

He admired his wit, his

A.—What did he say of Moore? H.-Just what every body says. facility, his fancy, and his mastery of versification, but thought him, as every one else does, I believe, too often deficient in truth and nature when he aims at a representation of our deeper passions. He said that though Moore's wit was brilliant and exhaustless, he had no humour himself, nor could he relish it in others. He was insensible, for instance, to Lamb's quiet quaint humour (a pleasant cross, as it appears to me, between Addison and Sterne,) and wondered what people could see to admire in those Essays of Elia, which gave so much popularity to the London Magazine, when it must otherwise have sunk under its own weight. That periodical soon died when Lamb withdrew from it.

A.-There were some clever fellows too upon the work. The Editor (John Scott) and Hazlitt, and Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham, and, though last not least-the" Opium Eater." What said Macaulay of other poets?

H.-He said Scott was a great writer,-that his poetry was Homeric.

A. How strange is this! In my opinion there never was a verse-spinner so overrated at one time, and so justly neglected at another. Who reads his namby-pamby common-place octosyllabics now? There is scarcely one single couplet in all his poems that embodies what may be called a thought, or even a new image. Who ever quotes him?

H. I have seen him quoted.

A.-Well-perhaps so-and, indeed, I now recollect having seen a few brief extracts from his poems-but what are the favorite quotations? The description in villainously halting verse of Melrose Abbey by moonlight-a passage of false sentiment about a tear trickling to a rival's bier, or some martial clap-trap.