additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless "Argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bore up, and steer'd From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his country. I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exists many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect that the irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, bes longs to the man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability. How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this charge, if the charge itself be not, as we have endeavored to show, supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can know one thing, and believe the opposite, yet assuredly, a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt to appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural than that this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling? But, alas! the multitude of books, and the general diffusion of literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded 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 barrel-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, which, 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 indolence; 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 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, and * In the course of my lectures, I had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Mr. Pope's original compositions, particularly in 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 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, "As when the moon, resplendant 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 reading 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 in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting, that αέρα φαεινην αμφι δεληνην φαινει αριπρεπέα” (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, "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 attacks; 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 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 envenomed feelings. Even during their shortlived success, 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 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 cast, 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 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 habitat of the elegiac Edipus subscribed; and other ingenius solutions were likewise given' to the said rebuses -not, as heretofore, by Crito, Philander, A, B, Y, &c.-but by fifty or sixty plain English surnames at full length, with their 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 magazinės, 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. * A phrase of Andrew Marvel's. 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-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 (sxμaxias) in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or even if this were ad mitted, 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 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.* *This is one instance, among many, of deception, by telling the half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their mutual counteraction and neu |