the knights or the barbarians, another | costumes and decorations into true from peasants or journalists, not too ones. Architecture built Roman villas critical of incongruities, pretentious and satisfied with his motley and badly sewn cloak, till at last, after many attempts and many rents, he ended by knowing himself, and selecting the dress that fitted him.

in our northern climates, and feudal towers amidst our modern security. Painters travelled to imitate local coloring and studied to reproduce moral coloring. Every man became a tourist and an archæologist; the human mind quitting its individual sentiments to adopt all sentiments really felt, and finally all possible sentiments, found its pattern in the great Goethe, who by his Tasso, Iphigenia, Divan, his second part of Faust, became a citizen of ail nations and a contemporary of all ages, seemed to live at pleasure at every point of time and place, and gave an idea of universal mind. Yet this literature, as it approached perfection, approached its limit, and was only devel

In this confusion of labors two great deas stand out: the first producing historical poetry, the second philosophical; the one especially manifest in Southey and Walter Scott, the other in Wordsworth and Shelley; both Euroean, and displayed with equal brilliancy in France by Hugo, Lamartine, and Musset; with greater brilliancy in Germany by Goethe, Schiller, Rückert, and Heine; both so profound, that none of their representatives, except Goethe, divined their scope; and hard-oped in order to die. Men did comly now, after more than half a century, can we define their nature, so as to forecast their results.

prehend at last tha attempted resurrections are always incomplete, that every imitation is only an imitation, The first consists in saying, or rather that the modern accent infallibly peneforeboding, that our ideal is not the trates the words which we place in the ideal; it is only one ideal, but there mouths of ancient characters, that are others. The barbarian, the feudal every picture of manners must be inman, the cavalier of the Renaissance, digenous and contemporaneous, and the Mussulman, the Indian, each age that archaic literature is essentially unand each race has conceived its beauty, true. People saw at last that it is in which was a beauty. Let us enjoy it, the writers of the past that we must and for this purpose put ourselves en- seek the portraiture of the past; that tirely in the place of the discoverers; there are no Greek tragedies but the for it will not suffice to depict, as the Greek tragedies; that the concocted previous novelists and dramatists have novel must give place to authentic medone, modern and national manners un-moirs, as the fabricated ballad to the der old and foreign names; let us paint the sentiments of other ages and other races with their own features, however different these features may be from our own, and however unpleasing to our taste. Let us show our hero as he was, grotesque or not, with his true costume and speech: let him be fierce and superstitious if he was so; let us dash the barbarian with blood, and load the Covenanter with his bundle of biblical texts. Then one by one on the literary stage men saw the vanished or distant civilizations return; first the middle age and the Renaissance; then Arabia, Hindostan, and Persia; then he classical age, and the eighteenth century itself; and the historic taste becomes so eager, that from literature the contagion spread to other arts. The theatre changed its conventional

spontaneous; in other words, that historical literature must vanish and become transformed into criticism and history, that is, into exposition and commentary of documents.

How shall we sele t in this multi tude of travellers and historians, disguised as poets? They abound like swarms of insects, hatched on a sum mer's day amidst a rank vegetation; they buzz and glitter, and the mind is lost in their sparkle and hum. Which shall I quote? Thomas Moore, the gayest and most French of all, a witty railer,* too graceful and recherche, writing descriptive odes on the Bermudas sentimental Irish melodies, a poetic Egyptian tale,† a romantic poem on Persia and India;‡ Lamb, a restorer *See The Fudge Family. The Epicurean.

Lalla Rookh.

where the lotus spreads its arge leaves. where thorny plants raise their many thousand purple calices around the apes and crocodiles which are wor shipped as divinities, and crawl in the thickets. Meantime the dancing-girls lay their hands on their heart with deep and delicate emotion, the tenor sing that they are ready to die, tyrants roll forth their deep bass voice, the orchestra struggles hard, accompanying the variations of sentiment with the gentle sounds of flutes, the lugubrious clamors of the trombones, the angelic melodies of the harps; till at last, when the heroine sets her foot on the throat of the traitor, it breaks out triumphantly with its thousand vibrant voices harmonized into a single strain. A fine spectacle! we depart mazed. deafened; the senses give way under this inundation of splendors; but as we return home, we ask ourselves what we have learnt, felt-whether we have, in truth, felt any thing. After all, there is little here but decoration and scenery; the sentiments are factitious they are operatic sentiments: the au

of the old drama; Coleridge, a thinker | and dreamer, a poet and critic, who in Christabel and the Ancient Mariner reopened the vein of the supernatural and the fantastic; Campbell, who, having begun with a didactic poem on the Pleasures of Hope, entered the new school without giving up his noble and half-classical style, and wrote American and Celtic poems, only slightly Celtic and American; in the first rank, Southey, a clever man, who, after several mistakes in his youth, became the professed defender of aristocracy and cant, an indefatigable reader, an inexhaustible writer, crammed with erudition, gifted in imagination, famed like Victor Hugo for the freshness of his .nnovations, the combative tone of his prefaces, the splendors of his picturesque curiosity, having spanned the universe and all history with his poetic shows, and embraced in the endless web of his verse, Joan of Arc, Wat Tyler, Roderick the Goth, Madoc, Thalaba, Kehama, Celtic and Mexican traditions, Arabic and Indian legends, successively a Catholic, a Mussulman, a Brahmin, but only in verse; in real-thors are only clever men, libretti-makity, a prudent and respectable Protestant. The above-mentioned authors have to be taken as examples merely there are dozens behind; and I think that, of all fine visible or imaginable sceneries, of all great real or legendary events, at all times, in the four quarters of the world, not one has escaped them. The diorama they show us is very brilliant; unfortunately we perceive that it is manufactured. If we would have its fellow picture, let us imagine ourselves at the opera. The decorations are splendid, we see them coming down from above, that is, from the ceiling, thrice in an act; lofty Gothic cathedrals, whose rose-windows glow in the rays of the setting sun, whilst processions wind round the pillars, and the lights flicker over the elaborate copes and the gold embroidery of the priestly vestments; mosques and minarets, moving caravars creeping afar over the yellow sand, whose lances and canopies, ranged in line, fringe the immaculate whiteness of the horizon; Indian paradises, where the heaped roses swarm in myriads, where fountains mingle their piumes of pearls,

ers, manufacturers of painted canvas ; they have talent without genius; they draw their ideas not from the heart, but from the head. Such is the impression left by Lalla Rookh, Thalaba, Roderick the last of the Goths, The Curse of Kehama, and the rest of these poems. They are great decorative machines suited to the fashion. The mark of genius is the discovery of some wide unexplored region in human nature, and this mark fails them; they prove only much cleverness and kr.owledge. After all, I prefer to see the East in Orientals from the East, rather than in Orientals in England; in Vyasa or Firdousi, rather than in Southey and Moore. These poems may be descriptive or historical; they are less so than the texts, notes, emendations, and justifications which their authors carefully print at the foot of the page.

*

Beyond all general causes which have fettered this literature, there is a national one: the mind of these men's

See also The History of the Caliph Vathek a fantastic but powerfully written tale, by W Beckford, published first in French in 1784.

not sufficiently flexible, and too moral. | torian, and poet, the favorite of his age, Their imitation is only literal. They read over the whole of Europe, was know past times and distant lands only compared and almost equalled to as antiquaries and travellers. When Shakspeare, had more popularity than they mention a custom, they put their Voltaire, made dressmakers and duchauthorities in a foot-note; they do not esses weep, and earned about two hunpresent themselves before the public dred thousand pounds. Murray, the without testimonials; they establish by publisher, wrote to him: "I believe I weighty certificates that they have not might swear that I never experienced committed an error in topography or such unmixed pleasure as the reading Costume. Moore, like Southey, named of this exquisite work (first series of his authorities; Sir John Malcolm, Sir Tales of my Landlord) has afforded me. William Ouseley, Mr. Carey, and Lord Holland said, when I asked others, who returned from the East, his opinion: 'Opinion! we did not one and had lived there, state that his de- of us go to bed last night-nothing scriptions are wonderfully faithful, that slept but my gout.'"* In France, they thought that Moore had travelled in fourteen hundred thousand volumes of the East. In this respect their minute- these novels were sold, and they conness is ridiculous; * and their notes, tinue to sell. The author, born in lavished without stint, show that their Edinburgh, was the son of a Writer to matter-of-fact public required to ascer- the Signet, learned in feudal law and tain whether their poetical commodities ecclesiastical history, himself an advowere genuine produce. But that broad- cate, a sheriff, and always fond of er truth, which lies in penetrating into antiquities, especially national antiqui the feelings of characters, escaped ties; so that by his family, education them; these feelings are too strange by his own instincts, he found the ma and immoral. When Moore tried to terials for his works and the stimulus translate and recast Anacreon, he was for his talent. His past recollections told that his poetry was fit for "the were impressed on him at the age of stews." t To write an Indian poem, three, in a farm-house, where he had we must be pantheistical at heart, a been taken to try the effect of bracing little mad, and pretty generally vision-air on his little shrunken leg. He was ary; to write a Greek poem, we must wrapt naked in the warm skin of a be polytheistic at heart, fundamentally sheep just killed, and he crept about in pagan, and a naturalist by profession. this attire, which passed for a specific. This is the reason that Heine spoke so He continued to limp, and became a fitiy of India, and Goethe of Greece. A reader. From his infancy he listened genuine historian is not sure that his to the stories which he afterwards gave own civilization is perfect, and lives as to the public,-that of the battle of gladly out of his country as in it. Culloden, of the cruelties practised on Judge whether Englishmen can succeed the Highlanders, the wars and sufferin this style. In their eyes, there isngs of the Covenanters. At three he only one rational civilization, which is their own; every other morality is inferior, every other religion is extravagant. With such narrowness, how can they reproduce these other moralities and religions? Sympathy alone can restore extinguished or foreign manners, and sympathy here is forDidden. Under this narrow rule, hiscorical poetry, which itself is hardly iikely to live, languishes as though suffocated under a leaden cover.

One of them, a novelist, critic, his* See the notes of Southey, worse than those

of Chateaubriand in the Martyrs. ↑ Edinburgh Review.

used to sing out the ballad of Hardy. kanute so loudly, that he prevented the village minister, a man gifted with a very fine voice, from being heard, anc even from hearing himself. As soon as he had heard "Border-raid ballad," he knew it by heart. But in other things he was indolent, studied by fits and starts, and did not readily learn dry hard facts; yet for poetry, old songs, and ballads, the flow of his genius was precocious, swift, and invincible. The day on which he first opened, "under a platanus tree," the

* Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, vols., ad ed., 1839, ii. ch. xxxvii. p. 170.

This

manly citizen? Walter Scott pauses on the threshold of the soul, and in the vestibule of history, selects in the Renaissance and the middle age only the fit and agreeable, blots out plain spoken words, licentious sensuality, bestial ferocity. After all, his characters, to whatever age he transports them, are his neighbors, "cannie" farmers, vain lairds, gloved gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less com. monplace, that is, steady; by their education and character at a great distance from the voluptuous fools of the Restoration, or the heroic brutes and fierce beasts of the middle age. As he has the greatest supply of rich costumes, and the most inexhaustible talent for scenic effect, he makes all his people get on very pleasantly, and composes tales which, in truth, have only the merit of fashion, though that fashion may last a hundred years yet.

ized, embellished, arranged in modern | discover, or how dare exhibit, the guise. We might suspect it when look- structure of barbarous souls? ng at the character and life of the structure is too difficult to discover, and author; for what does he desire, and too little pleasing to show. Every two what do the guests, eager to hear him, centuries, amongst men, the proportion demand? Is he a lover of truth as it of images and ideas, the mainspring of is, foul and fierce; an inquisitive ex- passions, the degree of reflection, the plorer, indifferent to contemporary ap- species of inclinations, change. Who, plause, bent alone on defining the trans- without a long preliminary training, formations of living nature? By no now understands and relishes Dante, means. He is in history, as he is at Rabelais, and Rubens? And how, for Abbotsford, bent on arranging points instance, could these great Catholic and of view and Gothic halls. The moon mystical dreams, these vast temerities, will come in well there between the or these impurities of canal art, find towers; here is a nicely placed breast-entrance into the head of this gentleplate, the ray of light which it throws back is pleasant to see on these old hangings; suppose we took out the feudal garments from the wardrobe and invited the guests to a masquerade? The entertainment would be a fine one, in accordance with their reminiscences and their aristocratic principles. English lords, fresh from a bitter war against French democracy, ought to enter zealously into this commemoration of their ancestors. Moreover, there are ladies and young girls, and we must arrange the show, so as not to shock their severe morality and their delicate feelings, make them weep becomingly; not put on the stage overstrong passions, which they would not understand; on the contrary, select heroines to resemble them, always touching, but above all correct; young gentlemen, Evandale, Morton, Ivanhoe, irreproachably brought up, tender and grave, even slightly melancholic (it is the latest fashion), and worthy to lead them to the altar. Is there a man more suited than the author to compose such a spectacle? He is a good Protestant, a good husband, a good father, very moral, so decided a Tory that he carries off as a relic a glass from which the king has just drunk. In addition, he has neither talent nor leisure to reach the depths of his characters. He devotes himself to the exterior; he sees and describes forms and externals much more at length than inward feelings. Again, he treats his mind like a coal-mine, serviceable for quick working, and for the greatest possible gain: a volume in a month, sometimes in a fortnight even, and this volume is worth one thousand pounds. How should he

That which he himself acted lasted for a shorter time. To sustain his princely hospitality and his feudal magnificence, he went into partnership with his printers; lord of the manor in public and merchant in private, he gave them his signature, without keeping a check over the use they made of it. Bankruptcy followed; at the age of fifty-five he was ruined, and one hundred and seventeen thousand pounds in debt. With admirable cour

If Constable's Memorials (3 vols. 1873) portion of his work, he perhaps would have had been published when M. Taine wrote this seen reason to alter this opinion, because it is clear that, so far from Sir Walter's printer and publisher ruining him, they, if not ruined by in the imprudences that led to the disaster.Sir Walter, were only equal sharers with him TR.