my presence, for "that I was as sore as a bile about that sonnet;" he not knowing that I was, myself, the author of it.

CHAPTER II.

Supposed irritability of men of genius-Brought to the test of facts-Causes and occasions of the charge-Its, injustice.

something of the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason, therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in. an intermundium, of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These, in tranquil times, are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts, that, arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But, alas! in times of tumult, they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of Ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages, in order to substitute the fancies of a day. and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds.* The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works, or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned with regard to imme

I HAVE often thought that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze and bring forward into distinct consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favor of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his time, "Genus irritabile vatum." A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we well know, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by coacervation; or, like bees, they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism (such, at least, was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, Schwarmen, Schwarmery. The pas-diate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer, sion being in an inverse proportion to the insight, that the more vivid as this the less distinct, anger is the inevitable consequence. The absence of all foundation within their own minds for that which they yet believe both true and indispensable for their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear, from which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us, that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections. blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations, than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest, even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those who possess more than the mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others,) yet still want

there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself. Shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Mr. Popet when he asserted

"Of old things all are over old,

Of good things none are good enough;-
We'll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff."

which circumstances the drama itself arose. The circum

Mr. Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from being sufficiently exploded, even at the present day. It consists, (as I explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,) in mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage, certain rules which the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the remaining parts of the drama, consistent with those that had been forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of stances in the time of Shakspeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter, were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider sphere, and a deeper and more but means to an end; consequently, where the ends are different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have ascertained what the end is before we can determine what the rules ought to be. Judging under this impression, I did not hesitate to declare my full conviction, that the consummate judgment of Shakspeare, not only in the general construction, but in all the detail of his dramas, impressed me with greater wonder than even the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy. The substance of these lectures I hope soon to publish; and it is but a debt of justice to myself and my friends, to notice, that the first course of .ectures, which differed from the following courses only by occasionally varying

human interest. Critics are too apt to forget that rules are

and put them on their guard. And hence, individuals below mediocrity, not less in natural power than acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers that had failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men who, being first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and malevolence, have been able to drive a successful trade in the employment of booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions of mankind. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect, with embittered and enve

complaints of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile,) be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favorites only of Pan or Apollo could construct even the rude Syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by the labors of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a harrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes, (for it is with similes as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another,) I have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces,nomed feelings. Even during their short-lived sucwhich, in the present anglo-gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better; for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges innocence; and secures the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence, of all trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference, indeed, between these and the works of genius, is not less than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.

Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination the works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of readers, but by men of the first-rate ability, till some accident or chance* discussion have aroused their attention,

In the course of my lectures, I have occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Mr. Pope's original compositions, particularly in his satires and moral essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which I do not stand alone in regarding as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction. And this, by-the-by, is an additional confirmation of a remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that next to the man who formed and elevated the taste of the public, he that corrupted it is commonly the greatest genius. Among other passages, I analyzed, sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popular lines,

cess, sensible, in spite of themselves, on what a shifting foundation it rested, they resent the mere refusal of praise, as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the

"Around her throne the vivid planets roll,

And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole," the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was, that though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I had been newly couched, when by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated elegy. I had long before detected the defects in "the Bard;" but "the Elegy" I had considered as proof against all fair at tacks; and to this day I cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me, by the additional delight with which I read the remainder.

† Especially" in this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail! When the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patchwork notes which possess, however, the comparative merit of being more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and conjectures! In an age, when even sermons are published with a double appendix stuffed with names-in a generation so transformed from the characteristic reserve of Britons, that from the ephemeral sheet of a London newspaper, to the everlasting Scotch Professorial Quarto, almost every publication exhibits or flatters the epidemic distemper; that the very 'last year's rebuses' in the Ladies' Diary, are answered in a serious elegy on my father's death,' with the name and habis tat of the elegiac Edipus subscribed; and • other ingenious solutions were likewise given' to the said rebusesnot, as heretofore, by Crito, Philander, A, B. Y, &c.-but by

"As when the moon, resplendent lamp of light," &c. much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on Chalmers' British Poets, in the Quarterly Review. The impression on the audience, in general, was sudden and evident and a number of enlightened and highly educated individuals, who at different times afterwards addressed me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should not have struck them before: but at the same time acknowledged (so much had they been accustomed, in read-fifty or sixty plain English surnames at full length, with their ing poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense,) that they might 10 all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting that “αέρα φαεινήν αμφι δεληνην φαίνει αριπρεπει (i. e. the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky while it is difficult to determine whether in the lines,

several places of abode! In an age, when a bashful Philalethes, or Phileleutheros, is as rare on the title-pages, and among the signatures of our magazines, as a real name used to be in the days of our shy and notice-shunning grandfathers! When (more exquisite than all) I see an Epic Poem (spirits of Maro and Mæonides, make ready to welcome your new compeer!) advertised with the special recommendation, that the said Epic Poem contains more than an hundred names of living persons." —— Friend, No. 10.

lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion. And yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel some false charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more common. than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from its accidental relation to himself.*

For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary testiness or jealousy, I trust that I should have been, however, neither silly or arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on GENIUS. But an experience, (and I should not need documents in abundance to prove my words, if I added,) a tried experience of twenty years has taught me that the original sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who influence it; that praise and admiration have become, yearly, less and less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay, that it is difficult and distressing to me, to think with any interest even about the sale and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such con

fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized as "synodical individuals"* to speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a caste, like that of the PARAS in Hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper die to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable! Thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals, (men of undoubted talent, but not men of genius,) tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number, too, being so incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those who really are men of real genius; and in part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other property; I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as characteristic of genius. It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to suppose a review set on foot, the object of which was to criticise all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-siderations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to makers, and china-manufacturers; a review conducted in the same spirit, and which should take the same freedom with personal character as our literary journals. They would scarcely, I think, deny their belief, not only that the "genus irritabile" would be found to include many other species beside that of bards, but that the irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights (SKIоpaxias) in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or even if this were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a rare or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the muses should be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when, too, he has perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or should we pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that ambition of lasting praise, which is at once the crutch and ornament, which at once supports and betrays the infirmity of human virtue; is the character and property of the individual who labors for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow-feeling than that of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility, indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component part of genius. But it is no less an essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests, for this plain reason, that the man of genius

* A phrase of Andrew Marvel's.

me to believe, or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature or education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings; or, that it needed any other parents, or fosterers, than constitutional indolence, aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating embarrassments of procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant and alien.

Indignation at literary wrongs, I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of

†This is one instance, among many, of deception, by tell

ing the half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is whole truth arises, as a tertiam aliquid different from either. Thus in Dryden's famous line, "Great wit" (which here means genius) to madness sure is near allied." Now, as far as the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater chance of mental derangement; but then a more of passing from thought to thought, and image to image, is a than usual rapidity of association, a more than usual power component equally essential; and in the duc modification of each by the other, the genius itself consists, so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth as in imminent danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the asserter of the absurdity confined his attention either to the projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.

from their mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the

is rendered absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher, the thought is justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of visualized Puns.

CHAPTER III.

--Principles of modern criticism-Mr. Southey's works and character.

the provocation, and the importance of the object. There is no profession on earth which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting, as that of poetry; and, indeed, as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the demands both of the taste and of sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be conjectured from the failure of those who have attempted poetry late in life. Where, then, a man has, from his earliest youth, de- The author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion voted his whole being to an object which, by the admission of all civilized nations in all ages, is honorable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attainment; what, of all that relates to himself and his family, if only we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize acts of self-defence than the elaborate products of his intellect, and intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful experience! I have laid too many eggs in the hot sand of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion. The greater part, indeed, have been trod under foot, and are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies; of them that, unprovoked, have lain in wait against my soul,

"Sic vos, non vobis mellificatis, apes!"

An instance in confirmation of the note, p. 243, occurs to me as I am correcting this sheet, with the FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS open before me. Mr. ard first traces Fletcher's lines:

"More foul diseases than e'er yet the hot
Sun bred through his burnings, while the dog
Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
And deadly vapor from his angry breath,
Filling the lower world with plague and death,”—

To Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar,

"The rampant lion hunts he fast
With dogs of noisome breath.

Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
Pyne, plagues, and dreary death!"'

To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news journals of various name and rank, and to satirists, with or without a name, in verse or prose, or in verse text aided by prose comment, I do seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works, (which with a shelf or two of BEAUTIES, ELEGANT EXTRACTS and ANAS, form nine-tenths of the reading public)* cannot but be familiar with the name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for an eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of perusing the periodica! works may be properly added to Averrhoe'st cata. logue of ANTI-MNEMONICS, or weakeners of the memory. But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect, that there must be

*For as to the devotees of the circulation libraries, I dare not compliment their pass time, or rather kill time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreamSewing, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an bundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. We should, therefore, transfer this species of amusement, (if indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, or relaxation be attributable to those whose bows are never bent,) from the genus, reading, to that comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the contrary yet co-existing propen sities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry in

He then takes occasion to introduce Homer's simile of the sight of Achilles's shield to Priam, compared with the Dog Star, literally thus—

"For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals." Nothing can be more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which, says Mr. S., is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope:

"Terrific Glory for his burning breath

Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!" Now here (not to mention the tremendous bombast) the Dog Star, so called, is turned into a real Dog-a very odd Dog-a fire, fever, plague, and death-breathing, red-air-tainting Dog; and the whole visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects

prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor

metre,) this genus comprises as its species, gaming, swinging. or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge, smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife: conning, word by word, all the advertisements of the daily advertiser in a public house on a rainy day, &c. &c. &c.

Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptus in arenam jacere incontuses; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in genere) on moveable things suspended in the air; riding among a multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests and humorous anecdotes, as when (go to modernize the learned Saracen's meaning) one man's dro!! story of an Irishman, inevitably occasions another's drol story of a Scotchman, which, again, by the same sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a Welchman, and that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman; the habit of reading tomb-stones in church-yards, &c. By-theby,is catalogue, strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychological commentary.