real joys of a superior state of existence. But it is needless to seek to define what all who have felt it must acknowledge passes all understanding.

It is a remarkable circumstance, indicative of the ethereal nature of the sentiment of love as depicted in the Poetry and Romances of modern times, that no attempt ever has been made to delineate it on canvass. The love of Heaven has been painted with divine tenderness by Raphael; the love of Earth, the allurements to the senses, with surpassing skill by Titian, Correggio, and the Caraccis. We have reclining Venuses, nymphs bathing, and seducing damsels enough, represented in painting, as well as Holy Families and infant Innocences; but neither Painting nor Statuary has ever thought of portraying on the canvass or marble the passion of Dido for Æneas, of Tancred for Clorinda, of Desdemona for Othello. The exquisite scene of the death of Clorinda, already given, has never yet been selected as the subject of painting. It would appear that that sentiment which so entirely subdues self, and eradicates, as it were, every feeling but the generous ones from the human breast, dwells too exclusively in the inmost recesses of the heart to be capable of representation in the external form. Like Heroism, Generosity, or Magnanimity, its existence may be learned from the actions; but its presence cannot be evinced from the expression. The reason is, that this refined feeling is found in so few breasts that no known symptoms of it could be recognised in the human countenance or form.

It is a common saying, even among persons of cultivated taste, that it is hopeless to attempt to advance anything new on the beauties of ancient authors; that everything that can be said on the subject has already been exhausted; and that it is in the more recent fields of modern literature that it is alone possible to avoid repetition. We are decidedly of opinion that this idea is erroneous, and that its diffusion has done more than anything else to degrade criticism to the low station which, with some honourable exceptions, it has so long held in the world of letters. It is the diversity of mind which is the real cause of mediocrity in observation: when the critic is obviously inferior to his author, he becomes ridiculous. But when

ancient excellence is contemplated with a generous eye, even when the mind that sees it is but slenderly gifted, who will say that nothing new will occur? When it meets kindred genius, when it is elevated by a congenial spirit, what a noble art does criticism become! What has it proved in the hands of Dryden and Pope, of Wilson and Macaulay! It is in the contemplation of ancient greatness, and its comparison with the parallel efforts of modern genius, that the highest flights of these gifted spirits have been attained, and the native generosity of real intellectual power most strikingly evinced. Criticism of words will soon come to an end; the notes of scholiasts and annotators are easily made, as apothecaries make drugs by pouring from one phial into another. But criticism of things, of ideas, of characters, of conceptions, can never come to an end; for every successive age is bringing forth fresh comparisons to make, and fresh combinations to exhibit. It is the outpouring of a heart overburdened with admiration which must be delivered, and will ever discover a new mode of deliver

ance.

How many subjects of critical comparison in this view, hitherto nearly untouched upon, has the literature of Europe, and even of this age, afforded! Eschylus, Shakspeare, and Schiller-Euripides, Alfieri, and Corneille-Sophocles, Metastasio, and Racine-Pindar, Horace, and Gray--Ovid, Ariosto, and Wieland-Lucretius, Darwin, and Campbell -Demosthenes, Cicero, and Burke-Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon-Thomson, Cowper, and Claude Lorraine : such are a few which suggest themselves at first sight to every one who reflects on the rich retrospect of departed genius. It is like looking back to the Alps through the long and rich vista of Italian landscape; the scene continually varies, the features are ever new, the impression is constantly fresh, from the variety of intervening objects, though the glittering pinnacles of the inaccessible mountains ever shine from afar on the azure vault of heaven. Human

genius is constantly furnishing new proofs of departed excellence. Human magnanimity is ever exhibiting fresh examples of the fidelity of former descriptions, or the grandeur of former conception. What said Hector, drawing his sword, when, betrayed by Minerva in his last

conflict with Achilles, he found himself without his lance in presence of his fully-armed and heaven-shielded antagonist?" Not inglorious at least shall I perish, but after doing some great thing that may be spoken of in ages to

GUIZOT

[BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, DEC. 1844]

MACHIAVEL was the first historian who seems to have formed a conception of the philosophy of history. Before his time, the narrative of human events was little more than a series of biographies, imperfectly connected together by a few slight sketches of the empires on which the actions of their heroes were exerted. In this style of history, the ancient writers were, and to the end of time probably will continue to be, altogether inimitable. Their skill in narrating a story, in developing the events of a life, in tracing the fortunes of a city or a state, as they were raised by a succession of illustrious patriots, or sunk by a series of oppressive tyrants, has never been approached in modern times. The histories of Xenophon and Thucydides, of Livy and Sallust, of Cæsar and Tacitus, are all more or less formed on this model; and the more extended view of history, as embracing an account of the countries the transactions of which were narrated, originally formed, and to a great part executed, by the father of history, Herodotus, appears to have been, in an unaccountable manner, lost by his successors.

In these immortal works, however, human transactions are uniformly regarded as they have been affected by, or called forth the agency of, individual men. We are never presented with the view of society in a mass; as influenced by a series of causes and effects independent of the agency of individual man; or, to speak more correctly, in the development of which the agency is an unconscious, and often almost a passive, instrument. Constantly regarding history as an extensive species of biography, they not only did not withdraw the eye to the distance necessary to obtain

such a general view of the progress of things, but they did the reverse. Their great object was to bring the eye so close as to see the whole virtues or vices of the principal figures, which they exhibited on their moving panorama; and in so doing, they rendered it incapable of perceiving, at the same time, the movement of the whole social body of which they formed a part. Even Livy, in his pictured narrative of Roman victories, is essentially biographical. His inimitable work owes its enduring celebrity to the charming episodes of individual history, or graphic pictures of particular events with which it abounds; scarcely any general views on the progress of society, or the causes to which its astonishing progress in the Roman state was owing, are to be found. In the introduction to the life of Catiline, Sallust has given, with unequalled power, a sketch of the causes which corrupted the republic; and if his work had been pursued in the same style, it would indeed have been a philosophical history. But neither the Catiline nor the Jugurthine War are histories: they are chapters of history, containing two interesting biographies. Scattered through the writings of Tacitus, are to be found numerous caustic and profound observations on human nature, and the increasing vices and selfishness of a corrupted age: but, like the maxims of Rochefoucault, it is rather to individual than general humanity that they refer; and they strike us as so admirably just because they do not descibe general causes operating upon society as a body-which often make little impression save on a few reflecting minds-but strike direct to the human heart in a way which comes home to the breast of every individual who reads them.

Never was a juster observation than that the human mind is never quiescent: it may not give the external symptoms of action, but it does not cease to have the internal action : it sleeps, but even then it dreams. Writers innumerable

have declaimed on the night of the Middle Ages, on the deluge of barbarism which, under the Goths, flooded the world, on the torpor of the human mind under the combined pressure of savage violence and priestly superstition; yet this was precisely the period when the minds of men, deprived of external vent, turned inwards on themselves ; and that the learned and thoughtful, shut out from any