is impressed on every page he writes. His object was to refute a swarm of popular sectarians, by proclaiming anew the ancient and Catholic faith. As the first postulate of his argument, he laid it down, that if a man would write well, either with rhythm or without, it behoved him to have something to say, From this elementary truth, he proceeded to the more abstruse and questionable tenet, that no man can be a very great poet who is not also a great philosopher.'

To what muse the highest honour is justly due, and what exercises of the poetic faculty ought to command, in the highest degree, the reverence of mankind, are problems not to be resolved without an enquiry into various recondite principles. But it is a far less obscure question what is the poetry which men do really love, ponder, commit to memory, incorporate into the mass of their habitual thoughts, digest as texts, or cherish as anodynes. This is a matter of fact, which Paternoster Row, if endowed with speech, could best determine. It would be brought to a decision, if some literary deluge (in the shape, for example, of a prohibitory book-tax) should sweep over the land-consigning to the abyss our whole poetical patrimony, and all the treasures of verse accumulated in our own generation. In that frightful catastrophe, who are the poets whom pious hands would be stretched out to save? The philosophical? They would sink unheeded, with Lucretius at their head. Or the allegorical? The waves would close unresistingly over them, though the Faery Queen herself should be submerged. Or the descriptive? Windsor Forest and Grongar Hill would disappear, with whole galleries of inferior paintings. Or the witty ? In such a tempest even Hudibras would not be rich enough to attract the zeal of the Salvors. Or the moral? Essays on man, with an infinite variety of the pleasures' of man's intellectual faculties, would sink unwept in the vast whirlpool. There too would perish, Lucan, with a long line of heroic cantos, romances in verse, and rhymes-amorous, fantastic, and bacchanalian. But, at whatever cost or hazard, leaves would be snatched, in that universal wreck, from the digressions and interstitial passages of the three great Epics of Greece, Italy, and England. The bursts of exultation and agony in the Agamemnon' would be rescued; with some of the Anthologies, and a few of the Odes of Anacreon and Horace. There would be a sacred emulation to save, from the all-absorbing flood, 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso;' with the • Odes and Fables of Dryden,' 'Henry and Emma,' 'The Rape of the Lock,' and the Epistle to Abelard;' Gray's Bard,' and Elegy,' Lord Lyttleton's Monody,' 'The Traveller,' 'The Deserted Village,' and 'The Task,' Mr Campbell's Shorter

6

Poems, and some of Mr Wordsworth's Sonnets; while the very spirit of martyrdom would be roused for the preservation of Burns, and the whole Shakspearian theatre; ballads, and old out of number; much devotional Psalmody, and, far above all the rest, the inspired songs of the sweet singers of Israel.

songs

No man, says Johnson, is a hypocrite in his pleasures. At school we learn by heart the De Arte Poeticâ. At college we are lectured in the Poetics. Launched into the wide world, we criticise or write, as it may happen, essays on the sublime and beautiful. But on the lonely sea-shore, or river-bank, or in the evening circle of familiar faces, or when the hearth glows on the silent chamber round which a man has ranged the chosen companions of his solitary hours, with which of them does he really hold the most frequent and grateful intercourse? Is it not with those who best give utterance to his own feelings, whether gay or mournful; or who best enable him to express the otherwise undefinable emotions of the passing hour? Philosophy is the high privilege of a few, but the affections are the birthright of all. It was an old complaint, that when wisdom lifted up her voice in the streets, none would regard it; but when was the genuine voice of passion ever unheeded? It is the universal language. It is the speech intelligible to every human being, though spoken, with any approach to perfection, by that little company alone, who are from time to time inspired to reveal man to himself, and to sustain and multiply the bonds of the universal brotherhood. It is a language of such power as to reject the aid of ornament, fulfilling its object best when it least strains and taxes the merely intellectual faculties. The poets, whom men secretly worship, are distinguished from the rest, not only by the art of ennobling common subjects; but by the rarer gift of imparting beauty to common thoughts, interest to common feelings, and dignity to common speech. True genius of this order can never be vulgar, and can, therefore, afford to be homely. It can never be trite, and can, therefore, pass along the beaten paths.

6

What philosophy is there in the wail of Cassandra? in the last dialogue of Hector and Andromache? in Gray's Elegy?' or in the Address to Mary in Heaven?' And yet when did philosophy ever appeal to mankind in a voice equally profound, About four-and-twenty years ago Mr Wolfe established a great and permanent reputation by half a dozen stanzas.

Almost as

many centuries have passed since the great poetess of Greece effected a similar triumph with as small an expenditure of words. Was Mr Wolfe a philosopher, or was Sappho? They were simply poets, who could set the indelible impress of genius on what all

the world had been feeling and saying before. They knew how to appropriate for ever to themselves a combination of thoughts and feelings, which, except in the combination, have not a trace of novelty, nor the slightest claim to be regarded as original. In shorter terms, they knew how to write heart-language.

A large proportion of the material of which the poetry of David, Eschylus, Homer, and Shakspeare is composed, if presented for use to many of our greatest writers in its unwrought and unfashioned state, would infallibly be rejected as common-place, and unworthy of all regard. Our poets must now be philosophers; as Burke has taught all our prose writers and most of our prosaic speakers to be, at least in effort and desire. Hence it is that so large a part of the poetry which is now published is received as worthy of all admiration, but not of much love-is praised in society, and laid aside in solitude—is rewarded by an undisputed celebrity, but not by any heartfelt homage -is heard as the discourse of a superior, but not as the voice of a brother.

The diligent students and cultivated admirers of poetry will assign to the author of Edwin the Fair' a rank second to none of the competitors for the laurel in his own generation. They will celebrate the rich and complex harmony of his metre, the masculine force of his understanding, the wide range of his survey of life and manners, and the profusion with which he can afford to lavish his intellectual resources. The mere lovers of his art will complain, that in the consciousness of his own mental wealth, he forgets the prevailing poverty; that he levies too severe a tribute of attention, and exacts from a thoughtless world meditations more deep, and abstractions more prolonged, than they are able or willing to command. Right or wrong, it is but as the solace of the cares, and as an escape from the lassitude of life, that most men surrender their minds to the fascination of poetry; and they are not disposed to obey the summons to arduous thinking, though proceeding from a stage resplendent with picturesque forms, and resounding with the most varied harmonies. They will admit that the author of Edwin the Fair' can both judge as a philosopher, and feel as a poet; but will wish that his poetry had been less philosophical, or his philosophy less poetical. It is a wish which will be seconded by those who revere his wisdom, and delight in his genius; and who, therefore, regret to anticipate that his labours will hardly be rewarded by an early or an extensive popularity.

ART. IV. Souvenirs de M. BERRYER. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1839.

A UTOBIOGRAPHIES may be divided into two classes; those which interest principally as a history of the mind of the writer, and those which derive their chief value from the events which they relate, or the persons whom they describe. The first class require the union of several rare conditions. Few men know their own history. Few men know the fluctuating nature of their own character;-how much it has varied from ten years to ten years, or even from year to year; or what qualities it would exhibit in untried circumstances, or even on the recurrence of similar events. Few men attempt to distinguish between the original predispositions and the accidental influences which, sometimes controlling and sometimes aggravating one another, together formed at any particular epoch their character for the time being. Still fewer attempt to estimate the relative force of each; and fewer still would succeed in such an attempt. The conver-sations, the books, the examples, the pains and the pleasures which constitute our education, exert an influence quite disproportioned to their apparent importance at the time when they occurred. Such influences operate long after their causes have been forgotten. The effects of early education are confounded with natural predisposition, and tendencies implanted by nature are attributed to events which were merely the occasions on which they burst forth. The bulk of men think of their minds as they think of their bodies: they enjoy their strength and regret their weakness, they dwell with pleasure on the points in which they are superior to others, and with pain on those in which they are inferior; but they cannot account for the one or for the other. They know no more of the causes of their talents or of their morals, than they do of their beauty or their vigour.

Again, among the few who have the power to relate their mental history, few indeed have the wish. Most men dread the imputation of egotism or vanity. Most men, too, are aware that a full narrative of their feelings, wishes, and habits, must frequently excite the disapprobation of a reader. Each mind,' says Foster, has an interior apartment of its own, into which none 'but itself and the Divinity can enter. In this retired place the passions mingle and fluctuate in unknown agitations. There, all the fantastic, and all the tragic shapes of imagination have a haunt where they can neither be invaded nor descried. There, 'the surrounding human beings, while quite unconscious of it, are made the subjects of deliberate thought, and many of the designs respecting them revolved in silence. There, projects,

' convictions, vows, are confusedly scattered, and the records of past life are laid. There, in solitary state, sits conscience, sur'rounded by her own thunders, which sometimes sleep, and some'times roar, while the world does not know."*

Men are unwilling to reveal, even posthumously, the secret which a whole life has been employed in concealing. Even those who could bear to excite disapprobation would be afraid of ridicule, and perfect frankness is certain to be absurd. We do not believe that a really unreserved autobiography has ever been written. Rousseau's appears to approach most nearly to Almost every chapter tends to make the writer hateful, contemptible, or ridiculous. And yet we now know that even the Confessions' are not to be depended upon. We now know that much has been concealed, and that much has been positively invented.

one.

Under these circumstances, autobiographies of the first class are almost as rare as epic poems; but those of the second class-those which amuse or instruct as pictures of the events and the people among whom the writer lived-are among the most abundant products of modern literature.

It is remarkable, however, that while soldiers, statesmen, diplomatists, men of letters, actors, artists, courtiers-in short, almost all classes who have something to tell, and who have been accustomed to notoriety-have been anxious to relate their own story to the public, one body of active men, though ready enough to talk of others, have been almost uniformly silent as to themselves. With the exception of the beautiful fragments by Sir Samuel Romilly, and they belong rather to the former class of autobiographies, and of the work the title of which we have prefixed to this article, we scarcely recollect an instance in which a Lawyer, either British or foreign, has thought fit to be his own biographer. And yet there are scarcely any persons the result of whose experience would be more instructive; since there are none who obtain so close or so undisturbed a view of human nature. In courts, in public assemblies, in business, in society, men are masked, and they generally believe that their success depends on their disguise. But few men think that any thing is to be gained by deceiving their lawyer. He is not their rival, but their instrument. His skill is to extricate them from difficulties where they know neither the amount of the danger nor the means of escape. He is to be the tool of their avarice or of their revenge. They generally know that, in order to enable him to execute their purposes, they must stand naked before him; and * Foster's Essays, p. 41.

སྨཱ