it, her enthusiasm must have advanced to madness. The spirit of party tends astonishingly to excite enthusiasm ; there is no faction that has not its "energumens," its devoted and possessed partisans. An animated speaker, who employs gesture in his addresses, has in his eyes, his voice, his movements, a subtle poison which passes with an arrow's speed into the ears and hearts of his partial hearers. It was on this ground that Queen Elizabeth forbade any one to preach, during six months, without an express license under her sign manual, that the peace of her kingdom might be undisturbed. St. Ignatius, who possessed very warm and susceptible feelings, read the lives of the fathers of the desert after being deeply read in romances. He becomes, in consequence, actuated by a double enthusiasm. He constitutes himself knight to the Virgin Mary, he performed the vigil of arms; he is eager to fight for his lady patroness; he is favoured with visions; the virgin appears, and recommends to him her son, and she enjoins him to give no other name to his society than that of the " Society of Jesus." Ignatius communicates his enthusiasm to another Spaniard, of the name of Xavier. Xavier hastens away to the Indies, of the language of which he is utterly ignorant; thence to Japan, without knowing a word of Japanese. That, however, is of no consequence; the flame of his enthusiasm catches the imagination of some young Jesuits, who, at length, make themselves masters of that language. These disciples, after Xavier's death, entertain not the shadow of a doubt that he performed more miracles than ever the apostles did, and that he resuscitated seven or eight persons at the very least. In short, so epidemical and powerful becomes the enthusiasm, that they form in Japan what they denominate a Christendom (une Chretientè). This Christendom ends in a civil war, in which • hundred thousand persons are slaugh tered: the enthusiasm then is at its hignest point, fanaticism; and fanaticism has become madness. The young fakir, who fixes his eye on the tip of his noise when saying his prayers, gradually kindles in devotional ardour, until he at length believes that if he burdens himself with chains of fifty pounds weight, the Supreme Being will be obliged and grateful to him. He goes to sleep with an imagination totally absorbed by Bramah, and is sure to have a sight of him in a dream. Occasionally, even in the intermediate state between sleeping and waking, sparks radiate from his eyes; he beholds Bramah resplendent with light; he falls into extacies, and the disease frequently becomes incurable. What is most rarely to be met with, is the combination of reason with enthusiasm. Reason consists in constantly perceiving things as they really are. He, who under the influence of intoxication, sees objects double, is at the time deprived of reason. Enthusiasm is precisely like wine, it has the power to excite such a ferment in the blood vessels, and such strong vibrations in the nerves, that reason is completely destroyed by it. But it may also occasion only slight agitations, so as not to convulse the brain, but merely to render it more active, as is the cause in grand bursts of eloquence, and more especially in sublime poetry. Reasonable enthusiasm is the patrimony of great poets. This reasonable enthusiasm is the perfection of their art. It is this which formerly occasioned the belief that poets were inspired by the gods; a notion which was never applied to other artists. How is reasoning to controul enthusiasm? A poet should, in the first instance, make a sketch of his design. Reason then holds the crayon. But when he is desirous to animate his characters, to communicate to them the different and just expressions of the passions, then his imagination kindles, enthusiasm is in full operation, and urges him on like fiery courser in his career. But mis course has been previously traced with coolness and judgment. Enthusiasm is admissible into every species of poetry which admits of sentiment: we occasionally find it even in the eclogue; witness the following lines of Virgil (Eclogue x. v. 58.) Jam mihi per rupes videor lucosque sonantes As if with sports my sufferings I could ease, The style of epistles and satires represses enthusiasm; we accordingly see little or nothing of it in the works of Boileau and Pope. Our odes, it is said by some, are genuine lyrical enthusiasm; but as they are not sung with us, they are, in fact, rather collections of verses, adorned with ingenious reflections, than odes. Of all modern odes, that which abounds with the noblest enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that never abates, that never falls into the bombastic or the ridiculous, is Timotheus, or Alexander's Feast, by Dryden. It is still considered in England as an inimitable masterpiece, which Pope, when attempting the same stile and the same subject, could not even approach. This ode was sung, set to music; and if the musician had been worthy of the poet, it would have been the masterpiece of lyric poesy. The most dangerous tendency of enthusiasm in this connection is that of urging on the poet to bombast, rant, and burlesque. A striking example of this occurs in an ode on the birth of a prince of the blood royal : Où suis-je? quel nouveau miracle Uu nouveau monde vient d'eclore Je vois des demeures divines J. B. ROUSSEAU. "Ode on the Birth of the Duke of Bretagne." Here we find the poet's senses enchanted and alarmed at the appearance of a prodigy-a vast and magnificent spectacle-a new birth, which is to reform the universe, and redeem it from a state of chaos, &c., all which means simply that a male child is born to the house of Bourbon. This is as bad as, "Je chante les vainqueurs, des vainqueurs de la terre." We will avail ourselves of the present opportunity to observe, that there is a very small portion of enthusiasm in the Ode on the Taking of Namur. ENVY. We all know what the ancients said of this disgraceful passion, and what the moderns have repeated. Hesiod is the first classic author who has spoken of it. "The potter envies the potter, the artisan the artisan, the poor even the poor, the musician the musician, (or, if any one chooses to give a different meaning to the word avidos) the poet the poet." Long before Hesiod, Job had remarked, "Envy destroys the littleminded." I believe Mandeville, the author of the Fable of the Bees, is the first who has endeavoured to prove that envy is a very good thing, a very useful passion. His first reason is, that envy was natural to man as hunger and thirst; that it may be observed in all children, as well as in horses and dogs. If you wish your chil dren should hate one another, caress one more than the other; the prescription is infallible. He asserts, that the first thing two young women do when they meet together, is to discover matter for ridicule, and the second to flatter each other. He thinks that without envy the arts would be only moderately cultivated, and that Raphael would never have been a great painter if he had not been jealous of Michael Angelo. Mandeville, perhaps, mistook emulation for envy; perhaps, also, emulation ie nothing but envy restricted within the bounds of decency. Michael Angelo might say to Raphael, your envy has only induced you to study and execute still better than I do; you have not depreciated me, you have not caballed against me before the pope, you have not endeavoured to get me excommunicated for placing in my picture of the Last Judgment one-eyed and lame persons in paradise, and pampered cardinals with beautiful women perfectly naked in hell! No! your envy is a laudable feeling; you are brave as well as envious; let us be good friends. EPIC POETRY. SINCE the word epos, among the Greeks, signified a discourse, an epic poem must have been a discourse: and it was in verse, because it was not then the custom to write in prose. This appears strange, but it is no less true. One Pherecides is supposed to have been the first Greek who made exclusive use of prose to compose one of those halftrue, half-false histories so common to antiquity. Orpheus, Linus, Thamyris, and Musæus, the predecessors of Homer, wrote But if the envious person is an un-in verse only. Hesiod, who was cerhappy being without talents, jealous of tainly contemporary with Homer, wrote merit as the poor are of the rich; if un- his Theogony and his poem of "Works der the pressure at once of indigence and and Days" entirely in verse. The harbaseness he writes "News from Par-mony of the Greek language so invited nassus," "Letters from a celebrated Countess," or " 'Literary Annals," the creature displays an envy which is in fact absolutely good for nothing, and for which even Mandeville could make no apology. Descartes said, "that envy forces up the yellow bile from the lower part of the liver, and the black bile that comes from the spleen, which diffuses itself from the heart by the arteries," &c. But as no species of bile is formed in the spleen, Descartes, when he spoke thus, deserved not to be envied for his physiology. A person of the name of Poet or Poetius, a theological blackguard, who accused Descartes of atheism, was exceedingly affected by the black bile. But he knew still less than Descartes how his detestable bile circulated through his blood. Madame Pernell is perfectly right : Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais l'envie. : Tartuffe, act v. scene 3. That it is better to excite envy than pity, is a good proverb. Let us, then, make men envy us as much as we are able. men to poetry, a maxim turned into verse was so easily engraved on the memory, that the laws, oracles, morals, and theology, were all composed in verse. Of Hesiod. He made use of fables, which had for a long time been received in Greece. It is clearly seen by the succinct manner in which he speaks of Prometheus and Epimetheus, that he supposes these notions already familiar to all the Greeks. He only mentions them to show that it is necessary to labour, and that an indolent repose, in which other mythologists have made the felicity of mar to consist, is a violation of the orders of the Supreme Being. Hesiod afterwards describes the four famous ages, of which he is the first who has spoken, at least among the ancient authors who remain to us. The first age is that which preceded Pandora,the time in which men lived with the gods. The iron age, is that of the siege of Thebes and Troy. "I live in the fifth," says he, “and I would I had never been born." How many men, oppressed by envy, fanaticism, and ty¿ranny, since Hesiod, have said the same! It is in this poem of "Works and Days" that those proverbs are found which have been perpetuated: as"the potter is jealous of the potter," and he adds, "the musician of the musician, and the poor even of the poor." We there find the original of our fable of the nightingale fallen into the claws of the vulture. The nightingale sings in vain to soften him; the vulture devours her. Hesiod does not conclude that a hungry belly has no ears, but that tyrants are not to be mollified by genius. in Asia. His poem was almost the only monument of that great epoch. There was no town or family which did not think itself honoured by having its name mentioned in these records of valour. We are even assured that a long time after him some differences between the Greek towns on the subject of adjacent lands were decided by the verses of Homer. He became, after his death, the judge of cities, in which it is pretended that he asked alms during his life; which proves, also, that the Greeks had poets A hundred maxims worthy of Xeno-long before they had geographers. phon and Cato are to be found in this poem. Men are ignorant of the advantage of society they know not that the half is more valuable than the whole. Iniquity is pernicious only to the powerless. Equity alone causes cities to flourish. One unjust man is often sufficient to ruin his country. The wretch who plots the destruction of his neighbour, often prepares the way to his own. The road to crime is short and easy. That of virtue is long and difficult; but towards the end it is delightful. God has placed labour as a sentinel over virtue, Lastly, the precepts on agriculture were worthy to be imitated by Virgil. There are, also, very fine passages in his Theogony. Love, who disentangles chaos; Venus, born of the sea from the genital parts of a god nourished on earth, always followed by Love, and uniting heaven, earth, and sea, are admirable emblems, Why, then, has Hesiod had less reputation than Homer? They seem to me of equal merit; but Homer has been preferred by the Greeks, because he sung their exploits and victories over the Asiatics, their eternal enemies. He celebrated all the families which in his time reigned in Achaia and Peloponessus; he wrote the most memorable war of the first people in Europe against the most flourishing nation which was then known It is astonishing that the Greeks, so disposed to honour epic poems which immortalised the combats of their ancestors, produced no one to sing the battles of Marathon, Thermopyla, Platea, and Salamis. The heroes of these times were much greater men than Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax. Tyrtæus, a captain, poet, and musician, like the King of Prussia in our days, made war and sang it. He animated the Spartans against the Messenians by his verses, and gained the victory. But his works are lost. It does not appear that any epic poem was written in the time of Pericles. The attention of genius was turned towards tragedy; so that Homer stood alone, and his glory increased daily. We now come to his Iliad. Of the Iliad. What confirms me in the opinion that Homer was of the Greek colony established at Smyrna, is the oriental style of all his metaphors and pictures :- The earth which shook under the feet of the army when it marched like the thunderbolts of Jupiter on the hills which overwhelmed the giant Typhon; a wind blacker than night winged with tempests; Mars and Minerva followed by Terror, Flight, and insatiable Discord, the sister and companion of Homicide, the god of battles, who raises tumults wherever she appears, and who, not content with setting the world by the ears, even exalts her proud head into heaven. The Iliad is full of these images, which caused the sculptor Bouchardon to say, "When I read Homer, I believe myself twenty feet high." His poem, which is not at all interesting to us, was very precious to the Greeks. His gods are ridiculous to reasonable but they were not so to partial eyes, and it was for partial eyes that he wrote. We laugh and shrug up our shoulders at these gods, who abused one another, fought one another, and combatted with men-who were wounded, and whose blood flowed: but such was the ancient theology of Greece and of almost all the Asiatic people. Every nation, every little village, had its particular god, which conducted it to battle. nobody. Homer has then painted the ideas of his own age; he could not paint those of the generations which succeeded him. poet, says, Homer has great faults: Horace confesses it, and all men of taste agree to it : there is only one commentator who is blind enough not to see them. Pope, who was himself a translator of the Greek "That it is a vast but uncultivated country, where we meet with all kinds of natural beauties, but which do not present themselves as regularly as in a garden; that it is an abundant nursery, which contains the seeds of all fruits; a great tree, that extends superfluous branches, which it is necessary to prune." Madame Dacier sides with the vast The inhabitants of the clouds, and of country, the nursery, and the tree, and the stars which were supposed in the would have nothing curtailed. She was clouds, had a cruel war. The combat of no doubt a woman superior to her sex, the angels against one another, was from and has done great service to letters, as time immemorial the foundation of the well as her husband; but when she be religion of the Bramins. The battle of came masculine and turned commentator, the Titans, the children of heaven and ≥ she so overacted her part, that she piqued earth, against the chief gods of Olympus, people into finding fault with Homer. was also the leading mystery of the Greek She was so obstinate as to quarrel even religion. Typhon, according to the Egyp-with Monsieur de la Motte. She wrote tians, had fought against Oshiret, whom we call Osiris, and cut him to pieces. Madame Dacier, in her preface to the Iliad, remarks very sensibly, after Eustatius, Bishop of Thessalonica, and Huet, Bishop of Avranches, that every neighbouring nation of the Hebrews had its god of war. Indeed, does not Jepthah say to the Ammonites, "Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So, whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, from them will we possess." Do we not see the God of Judah a conqueror in the mountains and repulsed in the vallies? As to men wrestling against divinities, that is a received idea. Jacob wrestled one whole night with an angel. If Jupiter sent a deceiving dream to the chief of the Greeks, the Lord also sent a deceiving spirit to King Ahab. These emblems were frequent, and astonished against him like the head of a college, and La Motte answered like a polite and witty woman. He translated the Iliad very badly; but he attacked Madame Dacier very well. We will not speak of the Odyssey here; we shall say something of that poem while treating of Ariosto. Of Virgil. It appears to me that the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Æneid are as much above all Greek and Latin poets, without exception, as the statues of Girardon are superior to all those which preceded them in France. It is often said that Virgil has borrowed many of the figures of Homer, and that he is even inferior to him in his imitations; but he has not imitated him at all in the three books of which I am speaking-he is there himself touching and appalling to the heart. Perhaps he was |