tures owe their fuccefs and credit. The retired and gloomy fcenes appointed for the most folemn rites of devotion; the aufterity and rigour of druidical difcipline and jurisdiction; the fafts, the penances, the fad excommunications from the comforts and privileges of civil life; the dreadful anathema, whofe vengeance pursued the wretched beyond the grave, which bounds all human power and mortal jurisdiction, muft deeply imprint on the mind every form of fuperftition, which fuch an Hierarchy presented. The Bard who was fubfervient to the Druid, had mixed them in his heroic fong; in his historical annals; in his medical practice: genii affifted his heroes ; dæmons decided the fate of the battle; and charms cured the fick, or the wounded. Nay after the confecrated groves were cut down, and the temples demolished, the tales that sprung from them were still preferved, with religious reverence, in the minds of the people.

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The Poet found himself happily fituated

amidst

amidst enchantments, ghofts, goblins; every element supposed the refidence of a kind of deity; the Genius of the mountain, the Spirit of the floods, the Oak endued with facred prophecy, made men walk abroad with a fearful apprehenfion

Of powers unseen, and mightier far than they. On the mountains, and in the woods, ftalked the angry Spectre; and in the gayest and most pleasing scenes, even within the cheerful haunts of men, amongst villages and farms,

Tripp'd the light fairies and the dapper elves.

The reader will eafily perceive what refources remained for the Poet, in this vifionary land of ideal forms. The general fcenery of nature, confidered as inanimate, only adorns the descriptive part of poetry; but being, according to the Celtic traditions, animated by a kind of Intelligences, the bard could better make ufe of them, for his moral purposes. That awe of the immediate prefence, of the Deity, which, among the vulgar of other nations, is confined to temples and altars, was here diffused over every object.

K

object. The Celt paffed trembling through the woods, and over the mountain, and near the lakes, inhabited by these invifible powers; fuch apprehenfions muft indeed

Deepen the murmur of the falling floods,

And fhed a browner horror on the woods

s;

give fearful accents to every whisper of the animate or inanimate creation, and arm every fhadow with terrors.

With great reafon, therefore, it has been afferted, that the western bards had an advantage over Homer, in the fuperftitions of their country. The religious ceremonies of Greece were more pompous than folemn; and feemed as much a part of their civil institutions, as belonging to spiritual matters : nor did they imprefs fo deep a fense of invifible beings, and prepare the mind to catch the enthusiasm of the Poet, and to receive. with veneration the Phantoms, he prefented.

Our countryman has another kind of fuperiority over the Greek Poets, even. the earliest of them, who, having imbibed the learning

learning of myfterious Egypt, addicted themselves to Allegory; but our Gothic Bard, instead of mere amufive allegory, employs the potent agency of facred Fable. When the world becomes learned and philofophical, Fable refines into Allegory. But the age of Fable is the golden age of Poetry; when reason, and the steady lamp of inquifitive philosophy, throw their penetrating rays upon the phantoms of Imagination, they difcover them to have been mere shadows, formed by ignorance. The thunderbolts of Jove, forged in Cimmerian caves: the ceftus of Venus, woven by the hands of the attracting Graces, cease to terrify and allure. Echo, from an amorous nymph, fades into voice, and nothing more; very threads of Iris's fcarf are untwisted; all the Poet's spells are broken, his charms diffolved: deferted on his own enchanted ground, he takes refuge in the groves of Philosophy; but there his divinities evaporate in allegory, in which mystic and insubstantial state, they do but weakly assist his operations. By affociating his muse

the

to Philosophy, he hopes the may establis with the learned the worship, she won from the ignorant; fo he makes her quit the old traditional fable, whence the derived her first authority and power, to follow airy hypothefis, and chimerical fyftems. Allegory, the daughter of fable, is admired by the faftidious Wit, and abftrufe Scholar, when her mother begins to be treated as fuperannuated, foolish, and doting; but however well the may please and amufe, not being worshipped as divine, fhe does not awe and terrify like facred mythology, nor ever can establish the fame fearful devotion, nor affume fuch arbitrary power over the mind. Her perfon is not adapted to the ftage, nor her qualities to the bufinefs and end of dramatic representation. L'Abbe du Bos has judiciously distinguished the reafons, why allegory is not fit for the drama. What the critic investigated by art and study, the wisdom of nature unfolded to our unlettered Poet, or he would not have refifted the prevalent fashion of his allegorizing age; especially