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We e come, lastly, to speak of the influence which Burke has exerted upon his and our times. This has been greater than most even of his admirers believe. He was one of the few parent minds which the world has produced. Well does Burns call him "Daddie Burke." And both politics and literature owe filial obligations to his unbounded genius. In politics he has been the father of moderate Conservatism, which is, at least, a tempering of Toryism, if not its sublimation. That conservatism in politics and in church matters exists now in Britain, is, we believe, mainly owing to the genius of two men -Burke and Coleridge. In literature, too, he set an example that has been widely followed. He unintentionally, and by the mere motion of his powerful mind, broke the chains in which Johnson was binding our style and criticism, without, however, going back himself, or leading back others, to the laxity of the Addisonian manner. All good and vigorous English style since-that of Godwin, that of Foster, that of Hall, that of Horsley, that of Coleridge, that of Jeffrey, that of Hazlitt, that of De Quincey, that of the "Times" newspaper -are much indebted to the power with which Burke stirred the stagnant waters of our literature, and by which, while propressedly an enemy of revolutions, he himself established "one of the greatest, most beneficial, and most lasting-that, namely, of a new, more impassioned, and less conventional mode of addressing the intellects and hearts of men.

Latterly, another change has threatened to come over us. Some men of genius have imported from abroad a mangled and mystic Germanism, which has been for awhile the rage. This has not, however, mingled kindly with the current of our literature. The philosophic language of jargon-and it is partly both of the Teutons has not been well assimilated, or thoroughly digested among us. From its frequent and affected use, it is fast becoming a nuisance. While thinkers have gladly availed themselves of all that is really valuable in its terminology, pretenders have still more eagerly sought shelter for their conceit or morbid weakness under its shield. The stuff, the verbiage, the mystic bewilderment, the affectation, the disguised commonplace, which every periodical almost now teems with, under the form of this foreign phraseology, are enormous, and would require a Swift, in a new "Tale of a

Tub," or "Battle of the Books," to expose them. We fancy, however, we see a re-action coming. Great is the AngloSaxon, the language of Shakspeare and Byron, and it shall yet prevail over the feeble refinements of the small mimics of the Teutonic giants. Germany was long Britain's humble echo and translator. Britain, please God! shall never become its shadow. Our thought, too, and faith, which have suffered from the same cause, are in due time to recover; nay, the process of restoration is begun. And among other remedies for the evil, while yet it in a great measure continues, we strongly recommend a recurrence to the works of our great classics in the past; and, among their bright list, let not him be forgotten, who, apart from his genius, his worth, and his political achievements, has in his works presented so many titles to be considered not only as the facile princeps among the writers of his own time (although this itself were high distinction), but as one of the first authors who, in any age or country, ever speculated or wrote.

NO. V.-EDGAR A. POE.

WE have sometimes amused ourselves by conjecturingHad the history of human genius run differently-had all men of that class been as wise, and prudent, and good, as too many of them have been improvident, foolish, and depraved-had we had a virtuous Burns, a pure Byron, a Goldsmith with common sense, a Coleridge with self-control, and a Poe with sobriety-what a different world it had been; what each of these surpassing spirits might have done to advance, refine, and purify society; what a host of "minor prophets" had been found among the array of the poets of our own country!— For more than the influence of kings, or rulers, or statesmen, or clergymen though it were multiplied tenfold-is that of the "Makers" whose winged words pass through all lands,

tingle in all ears, touch all hearts, and in all circumstances are remembered and come humming around us-in the hours of labor, in the intervals of business, in trouble, and sorrow, and sickness, and on the bed of death itself; who enjoy, in fact, a kind of omnipresence-whose thoughts have over us the threefold grasp of beauty, language, and music-and to whom at times "all power is given" in the "dreadful trance" of their genius, to move our beings to their foundations, and to make is better or worse, lower or higher men, according to their pleasure. Yet true it is, and pitiful as true, that these "Makers" themselves made of the finest clay-have often been "marred," and that the history of poets is one of the saddest and most humbling in the records of the world-sad and humbling especially, because the poet is ever seen side by side with his own ideal, that graven image of himself he has set up with his own hands, and his failure or fall is judged accordingly. Cowper says in his correspondence, "I have lately finished eight volumes of Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets;' in all that number I observe but one man whose mind seems to have had the slightest tincture of religion, and he was hardly in his senses. His name was Collins. But from the lives of all the rest there is but one inference to be drawn-that poets are a very worthless, wicked set of people." This is certainly too harsh, since these lives include the names of Addison, Watts, Young, and Milton; but it contains a portion of truth. Pocts, as a tribe, have been rather a worthless, wicked set of people; and certainly Edgar A. Poe, instead of be ing an exception, was probably the most worthless and wicked of all his fraternity.

And yet we must say, in justice, that the very greatest poets have been good as well as great. Shakspeare, judging him by his class and age, was undoubtedly, to say the least, a respectable member of society, as well as a warmhearted and generous man. Dante and Milton we need only name. And these are "the first three" in the poetic army. Wordsworth, Young, Cowper, Southey, Bowles, Crabbe, Pollok, are inferior but still great names, and they were all, in different measures, good men. And of late years, indeed, the instances of depraved genius have become rarer and rarer; so much so, that we are disposed to trace a portion of Poe's renown to

the fact that he stood forth an exception so gross, glaring, and defiant, to what was promising to become a general rule.

In character he was certainly one of the strangest anomalies in the history of mankind. Many men as dissipated as he have had warm hearts, honorable feelings, and have been loved and pitied by all. Many, in every other respect worthless, have had some one or two redeeming points; and the combination of "one virtue and a thousand crimes" has not been uncommon. Others have the excuse of partial derangement for errors otherwise monstrous and unpardonable. But none of these pleas can be made for Poe. He was no more a gentleman than he was a saint. His heart was as rotten as his conduct was infamous. He knew not what the terms honor and honorable meant. He had absolutely no virtue or good quality, unless you call remorse a virtue, and despair a grace. Some have called him mad; but we confess we see no evidence of this in his history. He showed himself, in many instances, a cool, calculating, deliberate blackguard. His intellect was of the clearest, sharpest, and most decisive kind. A large heart has often beat in the bosom of a debauchee; but Poe had not one spark of genuine tenderness, unless it were for his wife, whose heart, nevertheless, and constitution, he broke-hurrying her to a premature grave, that he might write" Annabel Lee" and "The Raven !" His conduct to his patron, and to the lady mentioned in his memoirs, whom he threatened to cover with infamy if she did not lend him moncy, was purely diabolical. He was, in short, a combination in almost equal proportions, of the fiend, the brute, and the genius. One might call him one of the Gadarene swine, filled with a devil, and hurrying down a steep place to perish in the waves; but none could deny that he was a swine of genius."

He has been compared to Swift, to Burns, to Sheridan, and to Hazlitt; but in none of these cases does the comparison fully hold. Swift had probably as black crimes on his conscience as Poe; but Swift could feel and could create in others the emotion of warmest friendship, and his outward conduct was irreproachable-it was otherwise with Poe. Burns had many errors, poor fellow! but they were "all of the flesh

none of the spirit;" he was originally one of the noblest of natures, and during all his career nothing mean, or dishonorable, or black-hearted was ever charged against him; he was an erring man-but still a man. Sheridan was a sad scamp, but had a kind of bonhommie about him which carried off in part your feeling of disgust; and, although false to his party, he was in general true to his friends. Hazlitt's faults were deep and dark; but he was what Poe was not-an intensely honest man; and he paid the penalty thereof in unheard-of abuse and proscription. In order to parallel Poe, we must go back to Savage and Dermody. If our readers will turn to the first or second volumes of the "Edinburgh Review," they will find an account of the last-mentioned, which will remind them very much of Poe's dark and discreditable history. Dermody, like Poe, was a habitual drunkard, licentious, false, treacherous, and capable of everything that was mean, base, and malignant; but, unlike Poe, his genius was not far above mediocrity. Hartley Coleridge, too, may recur to some as a case in point; but he was a harmless being, and a thorough gentleman-amiable, and, as the phrase goes, "nobody's enemy but his own."

How are we to account for this sad and miserable story? That Poe's circumstances were precarious from the first-that he was left an orphan-that without his natural protector he became early exposed to temptation-that his life was wandering and unsettled-all this does not explain the utter and reckless abandonment of his conduct, far less his systematic want of truth, and the dark sinistrous malice which rankled in his bosom. Habitual drunkenness does indeed tend to harden the heart; but, if Poe had possessed any heart originally, it might, as well as in the case of other dissipated men of genius, have resisted, and only in part yielded to the induration; and why did he permit himself to become the abject slave of the vice? The poet very properly puts "lust hard by hate” (and hence, perhaps, the proverbial fierceness of the bull), and Poe was as licentious as he was intemperate; but the question recurs, Why? We are driven to one of two suppositions: either that his moral nature was more than usually depraved ab origine that, as some have maintained, "conscience was omitted" in his constitution; or that, by the unrestrained in

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