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Pleasures^ Objects, 
 
 AND 
 
 Advantages of Literature, 
 
" I can wonder at nothing more than how a man can be idle — 
 but of all others, a scholar, — in so many improvements of reason, in 
 such sweetness of knowledge, in such variety of studies, in such 
 importunity of thoughts. To find wit in poetry; in philosophy, pro- 
 foundness ; in history, wonder of events ; in oratory, sweet eloquence ; 
 in divinity, supernatural light, and holy devotion — as so many rich 
 metals in their proper mines, — whom would it not ravish with 
 delight ? " — Bishop Hall : Epistle to Mr. Milivard. 
 
 " Comforts, yea ! joys ineffable they find, 
 
 Who seek the prouder pleasures of the mind : 
 The soul, collected in those happy hours, 
 Then makes her efforts, then enjoys her powers. 
 No ! 'tis not worldly gain, although, by chance, 
 The sons of learning may to wealth advance j 
 Nor station high, though in some favouring hour 
 The sons of learning may arrive at power j 
 Nor is it glory, though the public voice 
 Of honest praise will make the heart rejoice; 
 But 'tis the mind's own feelings give the joy,— 
 Pleasures she gathers in her own employ." 
 
 Crabbe : The Borough, Letter xxiv. 
 
Pleasures, Objects, 
 
 AND 
 
 Advantages of Literature. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. ROBERT ARIS V WILLMOTT. 
 w 
 
 NEW EDITION, 
 
 London : 
 
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, 
 
 BROADWAY, LUDGATH HILL j 
 
 NEW YORK : 129, GRAND STREET. 
 t866. 
 
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 «\ 
 
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 LONDON : 
 
 B. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL. 
 
TO 
 
 HIS MOTHER, 
 
 THESE 
 
 fkram 0f fitmtro, 
 
 THE DIM REMEMBRANCES OF EARLY DAYS, 
 
 %n mmxhzb 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE FIRST EDITION, 
 
 When three or four Tourists are met to- 
 gether, who have formerly visited the same 
 countries, it is amusing to observe their 
 different impressions of the scenery. A 
 mountain prospect delighted one, which 
 another overlooked or disregarded ; while a 
 fourth remembers an Alpine valley, unknown 
 to his companions, and of unequalled gran- 
 deur. The seasons and the hours most 
 favourable to picturesque enjoyment also sug- 
 gest many friendly djscussions ; a separate 
 eulogist being found for sunrise, evening and 
 moonlight. 
 
Vlll PREFACE TO THE 
 
 The Author would not be surprised if the 
 readers of the following Discourse should 
 resemble the party of travellers — some com- 
 plaining of fine scenes of fancy or learning 
 that are left out ; and others of inferior views 
 too elaborately presented. Variety must 
 always be an accident of Opinion. The 
 Writer, therefore, ofFers his sketches for what 
 they may be worth. He believes them to 
 have the merit of truth ; they were taken on 
 the spot by one who really made the Tour. 
 He hopes that his errors are neither serious 
 nor many ; but the recollection of a remark 
 upon a former publication induces him to 
 say, that he is in the habit of writing the 
 names of Painters and Authors as they appear 
 in the classical Criticism and Biography of 
 the eighteenth century ; — in Warton, Gilpin, 
 Price, and Reynolds — without reference to 
 the latest Hand-book, or Dictionary. To 
 
FIRST EDITION. IX 
 
 any graver objections he can only reply by 
 adopting the request of one of the oldest 
 living Poets in England, that all the fault- 
 finders will sit down immediately and excel 
 him as much as they can ; which he sincerely 
 desires may be as much as they please. 
 
NOTE 
 
 THE FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 The Author hopes that this Discourse has 
 been improved by its renewed revision, and 
 that the union of some of the Chapters has 
 given more harmony to the whole. It has 
 been considered expedient in the present 
 edition to omit the marginal references, which 
 would have prevented the compression of 
 the text within the space allotted to it. 
 
 St. Catherine's, 
 
 November 24., 1854. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. The Design and Limitations of this Discourse 
 II. The long Life of Books 
 III. Classical Studies : their Associations and Interest 
 IV '. Mental Delights of 'Early Life . 
 V. Taste j its Nature and Charms . 
 VI. Taste, an Inheritance and a fashion 
 VII. A Pure and Cultivated Taste seldom found 
 VIII. Taste puts an Author in a -proper Light . 
 IX. Books which are adapted to different Seasons 
 
 X. Diligence the Handmaid of Taste 
 XI. Criticism, its Curiosities and Researches 
 XII. Criticism enforces Unity of Purpose 
 XIII. Criticism the Source of many Delights . 
 
 14 
 
 17 
 21 
 
 24. 
 29 
 34- 
 37 
 40 
 
 53 
 56 
 
 XIV. The Lessons of Criticism . . . 63 
 
Xll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XV. Poetry f its Shapes and Beauties . . .70 
 
 XVI. Satire excluded from Poetry . . .84. 
 
 XVII. The Drama, its Character and Entertainment . 85 
 
 XVIII. The Delights and Consolations of Poetry . .91 
 
 XIX. Fiction: the Romance and the Novel . .98 
 
 XX. History: its Charms and Lessons . .110 
 
 XXI. The Flowers of History — Biography . .122 
 
 XXII. Literature of the Pulpit — its Entertainment . 14.1 
 
 XXIII. Philosophy and its Delights . . .148 
 
 XXIV. The Study of Languages . . .152 
 XXV. Domestic Interiors of Learning and Taste . 155 
 
 XXVI. Accountableness of Authors . . .162 
 
 XXVII. The cultivated Mind and the uninformed . 167 
 
PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 ADVANTAGES, 
 
 OF 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 I. — The Design and Limitations of this 
 Discourse. 
 
 I do not propose to speak of literature in the widest 
 sense, as including everything that requires inven- 
 tion, judgment, or industry, but only in its deco- 
 rative character. For, as out of three primitive 
 colours the pencil creates nine, and lesser tints and 
 shades innumerable, so from the elements of Poetry, 
 Eloquence, and Philosophy, the variegated graces of 
 the Divine, the Historian, and the Novelist, are 
 composed. Bacon referred the three parts of learning 
 to the corresponding qualities of the intellect ; His- 
 tory to the memory, Poetry to the imagination, and 
 Philosophy to the reason. My subject is the orna- 
 mental in knowledge. But since the criterion of 
 usefulness is found in the result, whatever is beauti- 
 ful is also profitable. The pictures of Raffaelle 
 teach virtue, and a sermon of Taylor is more binding 
 than an Act of Parliament. This truth should be 
 kept in view. Education is the apprenticeship of life. 
 
 B 
 
2 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 A discourse upon literature is not unlike a land- 
 scape seen from a hill. Only here and there may 
 we hope to catch a glimpse of the great river of 
 learning, " whose head, being far in the land, is, at 
 first rising, little and easily viewed ; but still, as 
 you go, it gapeth with a wider bank — not without 
 pleasure and delightful winding — while it is on 
 both sides set with trees and the beauty of various 
 flowers ; but still, the further you follow it, the 
 deeper and the broader it is, till, at last, it en- 
 waves itself in the unfathomed ocean." We shall 
 have clearer impressions of what we see, in propor- 
 tion as our gaze is patient and our objects are few. 
 
 Science is not embraced in the pleasures of litera- 
 ture. Refined readers and noble authors are made 
 without it. Ingenuity has endeavoured to show its 
 healthful influence on the inventive faculty ; and a 
 biographer of Tasso traces his lucid method to this 
 harsher erudition, and the intricacy of Spenser to the 
 neglect of it. Virgil and Milton are called as wit- 
 nesses for the argument ; but he who sees the sym- 
 metry of the Mneid in the geometry of the author, 
 could account for the rural sweetness of the Elegy 
 by the botany of Gray. Genius finds its own road, 
 and carries its own lamp. The fourth proposition 
 of Euclid troubled Alfieri for several years, yet he 
 could construct a story, and reason in verse. Fleury 
 might question the usefulness of logic, when he 
 observed so many people arguing well who did not 
 know it, and badly who did. 
 
 Mathematical studies have one leading defect ; 
 they engage the understanding without nourishing it, 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 3 
 
 and often resemble an elaborate mechanism to con- 
 vey water, without a spring, or a reservoir, to feed 
 the pipes. In moral impression they are powerless. 
 Burnet puts this objection with force : — " Learning 
 chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up 
 and fix one's thought, as to possess it entirely for 
 some time ; but when that amusement is over, 
 nature will return, and be where it was, being rather 
 diverted than overcome by such speculations." 
 These, among other reasons, induced Bossuet to 
 banish science from theological reading, and Fenelon 
 to turn from what he called the diabolism of Euclid. 
 We have the humiliating confession of a most fa- 
 mous English astronomer, to serve as a note for the 
 poetical lamentation, that — 
 
 " Never yet did philosophic tube r 
 That brings the planets home into the eye 
 Of observation, and discovers — else 
 Not visible — His family of worlds, 
 Discover Him that rules them : such a veil 
 Hangs over mortal eyes, blind from the birth, 
 And dark in things divine." 
 
 Cowper, pursuing with the eyes of devotion and 
 love the summer sun, as it set over the village spire 
 of Emberton, may have felt his heart swelling with 
 a grander sense of the Creator's glory, than has often 
 quickened the pulse of all the watchers of the stars, 
 from the Chaldeans to Herschel. 
 
 II. — The Long Life of Books. 
 
 There are two aspects under which we might re- 
 gard language, as a channel for communicating in- 
 
4- PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 struction and pleasure. One would be Speech. 
 How astonishing it is to know that a man may stand 
 in the crowd of learned or ignorant, thoughtful or 
 reckless hearers — all the elements of reason and pas- 
 sion tumultuously tossed together — and knock at 
 the door of each heart in succession ! Think how 
 this wonder has been wrought already. By De- 
 mosthenes waving the stormy democracy into a 
 calm, from a sunny hill-side ; by Plato enchaining 
 the souls of his disciples, under the boughs of a dim 
 plane-tree ; by Cicero in the stern silence of the 
 Forum ; by our own Chatham in the chapel of St. 
 Stephen. They knocked and entered ; wandered 
 through the bosoms of their hearers ; threaded the 
 dark labyrinths of feeling ; aroused the fiercest pas- 
 sions in their lone concealment. They did more. 
 In every heart they erected a throne, and gave laws. 
 The Athenian populace started up with one accord 
 and one cry to march upon Philip ; the Senate 
 throbbed with indignation at Catiline ; and the 
 British Parliament was dissolved for a few hours, 
 that it might recover from the wand of the enchanter. 
 
 But it is in the second manifestation of language 
 that the most marvellous faculty resides : the written 
 outlives and out-dazzles the spoken word. The 
 life of rhetoric perishes with the rhetorician ; it 
 darkens with his eye, stiffens with his hand, freezes 
 with his tongue. The bows of eloquence are buried 
 with the archers. Where is the splendid declama- 
 tion of Bolingbroke ? It has vanished, like his own 
 image, from the grass-plots of Twickenham. 
 
 That intellect, to which the printing-press gives 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 5 
 
 a body, an unquenchable spirit inhabits. Literature 
 is the immortality of speech. It embalms for all 
 ages the departed kings of learning, and watches 
 over their repose in the eternal pyramids of Fame. 
 The sumptuous cities which have lighted the world 
 since the beginning of time, are now beheld only in 
 the pictures of the historian or the poet. Homer 
 rebuilds Troy, and Thucydides renews the war of 
 Peloponnesus. The dart that pierced the Persian 
 breast-plate moulders in the dust of Marathon ; but 
 the arrow of Pindar quivers, at this hour, with the 
 life of his bow; like the discus of Hippomedon, 
 
 " Jamque procul meminit dextrae, servatque tenorem." 
 
 We look with grateful eyes upon this preservative 
 power of. literature. When the Gothic night 
 descended over Europe, Virgil and Livy were nearly 
 forgotten and unknown ; but far away, in lone cor- 
 ners of the earth amid silence and shadow, the 
 ritual of Genius continued to be solemnized : 
 without, were barbarism, storm, and darkness ; 
 within, light, fragrance, and music. So the sacred 
 fire of Learning burnt upon its scattered shrines, 
 until torch after torch carried the flame over the 
 world. 
 
 One of the Spanish romancers shows Cydippe 
 contemplating herself in a glass, and the power of 
 Venus making the reflection permanent. The fable 
 has a new and a pleasanter reading in the history of 
 Literature. A book becomes a mirror, with the 
 author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an 
 imperfect image — the broken glimmer of a counte- 
 nance. But the features of Genius remain unruffled. 
 
6 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual 
 Venus — whose children are the Tassos, the 
 Spensers, the Bacons — breathes the magic of her 
 love, and fixes the face for ever. 
 
 These glasses of fancy, eloquence, or wisdom, 
 possess a stranger power. Illuminated by the sun 
 of fame, they throw rays over watchful and reverent 
 admirers. The beholder carries away some of the 
 gilding lustre. And thus it happens that the light of 
 Genius never sets, but sheds itself upon other faces, 
 in different hues of splendour. Homer glows in the 
 softened beauty of Virgil, and Spenser revives in the 
 decorated learning of Gray. 
 
 Art has been less happy in its self-protection. 
 Look at Correggio's " Notte," where the light 
 breaks from the Heavenly Child. Towards the 
 close of the last century, a director of the Dresden 
 Gallery removed the toning^ and deprived the picture 
 of one of its fairest charms. Fifty years ago, ob- 
 servers complained that the colour was gone from 
 the u Cornaro Family " of Titian. The Helen of 
 Homer and the Faery Queen of Spenser are safe 
 from such a catastrophe. Lalage has not lost a 
 dimple. The tears still glisten in the eyes of 
 Erminia. The coarsest rubbings of critical pens, 
 or the harsher resolvents of digamma and allegory, 
 have left the features, and even the bloom of ex- 
 pression, unimpaired. 
 
 The poem, or the history, is also protected from 
 the restorer. Lord Orford told Gilpin that the 
 great Vandyck at Wilton had been retouched by an 
 inferior pencil, to which some of its discord oi 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 7 
 
 colours may be attributed. Dryden constructed a 
 'graceful allegory of Time, leaning over the work of 
 a great master, with that ready pencil and ripening 
 hand which 
 
 " Mellow the colours and imbrown the tint." 
 
 But Pope wrote the true story of Art when he said, 
 with the exquisite taste and feeling with which he. 
 always spoke of painters, as Milton of music, and 
 Thomson of scenery, — 
 
 " So when the faithful pencil has designed 
 Some bright idea of the master's mind, 
 When a new world leaps out at his command, 
 And ready nature waits upon his hand ; 
 When the ripe colours soften and unite, 
 And sweetly melt into just shade and light j 
 When mellowing years their full perfection give, 
 And each bold figure just begins to live, 
 The treacherous colours the fair art betray, 
 And all the bright creation fades away." 
 
 It is not pretended that the genius of the pen is 
 safe from all casualties that beset his brother of the 
 pencil. I have not forgotten Hume's letter to 
 Robertson about the gentleman who, sending for a 
 pound of raisins, received them wrapped up in the 
 Doctor's highly-drawn character of Queen Eliza- 
 beth. Literature has its complaint as well as its 
 paean. The splendid libraries of Rome are con- 
 sumed by fire, and the unknown treasures of Greece 
 perish in the sack of Constantinople. Still the poet 
 and the historian maintain their 'Supremacy over the 
 artist and the sculptor. A mob shatters into dust 
 that statue of Minerva whose limbs seemed to 
 breathe under the flowing robe, and her lips to 
 move ; but the fierceness of the Goth, the ignorance 
 of the Crusader, and the frenzy of the polemic, 
 
8 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 have not destroyed or mutilated Penelope and 
 
 Electra. Apelles dies ; iEschylus lives. And if 
 
 we have lost Phidias, Homer gives us a Jupiter in 
 gold. 
 
 Ill, — Classical Studies : their Associations 
 
 AND INTEREST. 
 " Books are not seldom talismans and spells." 
 
 The line is Cowper's. This charm dwells especially 
 in Greek and Latin writers. Much of it is owing 
 to the season when they are put into our hands. 
 Life is a garden of romance, and every day 
 
 " An Idyll with Boccaccio's spirit warm." 
 
 Our eyes lend their brightness to the things they 
 look upon. The book is endeared by the friends 
 and the pleasures it recalls. This feeling of remem- 
 brance often dims the eye of riper manhood, as it 
 recognises the worn-out school Horace, with its 
 familiar marks. Silent lips and cold hands seem 
 again to welcome and clasp us : — 
 
 " Up springs at every step, to claim a tear, 
 Some little friendship formed and cherished herej 
 And not the lightest leaf but trembling teems 
 With golden visions and romantic dreams." 
 
 Association is the delight of the heart, not less 
 than of poetry. Alison observes that an autumn 
 sunset, with its crimson clouds, glimmering trunks 
 of trees, and wavering tints upon the grass, seems 
 scarcely capable of embellishment. But if in this 
 calm and beautiful glow the chime of a distant bell 
 steal over the fields, the bosom heaves with the 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 0, 
 
 sensation that Dante so tenderly describes. The 
 pensive joy of the student is awakened in the same 
 manner. The clock of time, measuring the hours 
 of life's departing day, strikes mournfully over the 
 landscape of years. He remembers whom and 
 what he has lost. 
 
 Even without this sympathy of association, classic 
 story and fancy have a livelier interest than the 
 modern j they are shaded by the twilight into which 
 they are withdrawn. Delille indicated the defect of 
 the Henriade by saying that it was too near to the 
 eye and the age. It has been suggested that Milton 
 might have thrown his angelic warfare into remoter 
 perspective. The fame of a battle-field grows with 
 its years ; Napoleon storming the Bridge of Lodi, 
 and Wellington surveying the towers of Salamanca, 
 affect us with fainter emotions than Brutus reading 
 in his tent at Philippi, or Richard bearing down with 
 the English chivalry upon the white armies ot 
 Saladin. Nelson leading the line of war-ships against 
 Copenhagen is less picturesque than Drake crowding 
 his canvas after the galleons of Spain. One fleet lies 
 under our eye ; the other is enveloped in mist, and, 
 
 " Far off at sea descried, 
 Hangs in the clouds." 
 
 As we grow older, the poet and the historian of 
 our boyhood and youth become dearer. The thyme 
 of Theocritus is wafted over the memory with a 
 refreshing perfume. By a sort of natural magic, we 
 raise the ghost of each intellectual Pleasure, and 
 make it appear without any dependence upon climate 
 or time. The mind's theatre is lighted for the 
 
10 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Pageant of old Learning to march through it, with 
 all its pomp and music. The nightingale of Colonos 
 enjoys a perpetual May in Sophocles. Pindar be- 
 guiles the loneliness of Cowley ; while Horace lulls 
 asleep the cares of Sanderson, and the domestic 
 miseries of Hooker. 
 
 Unlike Science, Literature is not inductive. Its 
 secrets are never discovered by scholars, tracking 
 obscure hints which nature, or their ancestors, had 
 dropped. A basket, left on the ground and over- 
 grown by acanthus, suggests the Corinthian capital ; 
 the contemplation of the sun's rays along a wall pro- 
 duces the achromatic telescope ; the movements of 
 a frog reveal the wonders of galvanism ; and an idle 
 boy shows the way to perfect the steam-engine. 
 Nothing of this kind has happened in literature. 
 The Egyptian lake, in which some eyes see the 
 source of the old Greek streams, ever melts into 
 bluer distance, like the water-mist of the desert. 
 The Epic begins with the Iliad. The curtain 
 rises from the Agamemnon of iEschylus ; Pitt 
 borrows of Demosthenes ; Robertson does not 
 heighten the colours of Livy ; nor Montesquieu 
 outgaze the sagacity of Tacitus. 
 
 The Homeric poems are the Pleasures of Litera- 
 ture in an abridgment. They are the sap circulat- 
 ing through every leaf of the tree of knowledge, and 
 shedding blossoms on the furthest bough. Homer, 
 than dramatists more dramatic, was the founder of 
 the theatre, and peopled the stage. The Greek 
 tragedy is the epic recast ; the narrative being broken 
 into dialogue, and the poet disappearing in the Chorus. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. II 
 
 All the gentler shapes of fancy, seen in the lyrical 
 poetry of Greece, were only flowers growing round 
 his massive trunk, and sheltered by the majesty of 
 his shade. 
 
 Nor in verse alone was his presence perceived 
 and felt. See, in the wide-flowing stream of Plato's 
 philosophy, the rich fruits of the Poet's imagination, 
 pouring down into the transparent depths the re- 
 flected shadows of their beauty. The ear catches 
 the epic tune in the simpler melodies of Herodotus. 
 It is easy to tell why Arnold's eyes filled with tears 
 at the story of Cleobis and Biton, rewarded for their 
 filial piety by falling asleep in the temple, and dying 
 together ; and why he sat by the sick-bed of his 
 dying sister, translating whole books into the quainter 
 English of old chronicles. 
 
 The same under-current of song sometimes 
 freshens the dry track of Aristotle's severe inquiries, 
 and betrays its hidden course by unexpected flushes 
 of verdure and bloom over the hard surface. Him- 
 self the subject of all criticism, he let down from his 
 heaven of starry thoughts the scales, in which his 
 own genius was to be weighed. And whosoever, 
 in this calm weather of refinement and civilization, 
 sets out upon a voyage of poetical discovery, or 
 pleasure, is 
 
 " Led by the light or the Masonian star." 
 
 If we turn to Romance, we see its green world 
 of beauty, pathos, and wisdom, rising from the fruit- 
 ful waves of the Homeric inundation. Achilles, 
 Hector, and Ulysses present outlines of every hero 
 who has won admiration, or drawn tears. The two 
 
12 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 former embody, in outward grace and vigour, the 
 dreams, the enterprise, and the affections, of bright 
 and passionate manhood ; the latter is a type of the 
 tried spirit, educated and ennobled by difficulties 
 endured and overcome. 
 
 Let Homer signify u a faithful witness j" and who, 
 in portraying the glory, or the shame, of the manly 
 or the womanly heart, is more eloquent or true ? 
 The Odyssey is a circulating library in one volume. 
 All lights and shades of fiction chase each other 
 along the page. The border-story, the exploits of 
 chivalry, the fairy-legend, the solemn allegory, the 
 picture of manners, the laughter-moving sketch — 
 each drops, in turn, from the mysterious lips of the 
 Asiatic Shakspere. A thousand costly morals are 
 treasured in Telemachus conducted by Mentor* 
 What countless Ladies of Shalott have descended 
 from Calypso, who, in her lonely island of the purple 
 sea, 
 
 "' Busied with the loom, and plying fast 
 Her golden shuttle, with melodious voice 
 Sat chaunting there." 
 
 The Homeric characters live and walk among us. 
 Thersites grumbles and sneers ; Ulysses constantly 
 finds his way home, as the fortunate adventurer; 
 and Penelope has been reappearing, for the last two 
 centuries, in the deserted, or the tempted wife. 
 
 The key of the supernatural, which, in later times, 
 unlocked the haunted chambers of Udolpho, was cer- 
 tainly held by him who caused Mount Ida, the Greek 
 fleet, and the Trojan city, to trenr*ble all over as the 
 Gods came down into battle. And not very ob- 
 scurely may be seen rising over 'he epic mist, the 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 13 
 
 battlements of that Castle, which, as we learn from 
 Gray, made Cambridge men " in general afraid to 
 go to bed o'nights." The ghost of Alphonso, grow- 
 ing every moment more gigantic in the moonlight, 
 is not conceived with a fearfuller sweep of Gothic 
 magnificence, than the enormous stride of Achilles 
 in the world of spirits, when he heard that the son 
 was worthy of the father. The Poet's Hades had 
 mightier and stranger inhabitants than Otranto. Even 
 the school of horrors may date its beginning from 
 the cave of Polyphemus, when the spear of olive- 
 wood hissed in the flaming socket of his lost eye. 
 Reckon up the enchantments of Circe ; the escape 
 from the Sirens ; affection in humble life, as exhi- 
 bited by Eiimaeus ; the retributive phrenzy sent upon 
 the suitors of Penelope, and the bending of the won- 
 derful bow. Call to mind those delicious scenes 
 from nature, which make the reading of his verses 
 to be like opening a window into a garden, when 
 the south wind fans the roses up the wall. Think 
 over his noble sentiments, and his many lessons of 
 wisdom, generosity, and patience ; compare his 
 poetical fire — swallowing everything base in its 
 mighty rush — with the mild lustre of Virgil, the 
 artificial glow of Milton, or the accidental flames of 
 Shakspere ; and confess that Homer is not only the 
 Poet, but the Historian, the Philosopher, the Painter, 
 the Critic, and the Romancer of the world. 
 
14 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 IV. — Mental Delights of Early Life. 
 
 There is one pleasure of literature that fades almost 
 as quickly as it blooms. I mean the intensity of 
 belief in what we read ; when turning our mind 
 adrift upon a story, we glide, according to its will, 
 beside overhanging gardens, or twilight depths of 
 trees, until, floated beyond the colours and sounds of 
 common scenes and life, we find ourselves under 
 
 " Magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery-land forlorn." 
 
 Mr. Stewart thought that his relish for tales of 
 wonder was as lively in the decline of his life as it 
 had been in the beginning, and that he did not value 
 the amusement which they afforded him the less, 
 because his reason taught him to regard them as 
 vehicles of entertainment, not as articles of faith. 
 His explanation refutes itself. The sense of reality 
 gives the charm. Introduce judgment, and the spell 
 is broken. The undoubting mind, which Collins 
 bestowed upon Tasso, is the characteristic only of 
 the great poet, or the youngest reader. Romance is 
 the truth of imagination and boyhood. Homer's 
 horses clear the world with a bound. The child's 
 eye needs no horizon to its prospect. An Oriental 
 tale is not too vast. Pearls dropping from trees are 
 only falling leaves in autumn. The palace that 
 grew up in a night merely awakens a wish to live in 
 it. The impossibilities of fifty years are the com- 
 monplaces of five. 
 
 What philosopher of the school-room, with the 
 mental dowry of four summers, ever questions the 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 15 
 
 power of the wand that opened the dark eyes of the 
 beautiful Princess ; or subtracts a single inch from 
 the stride of seven leagues ? The Giant-killer with 
 the familiar name has the boy's whole heart. And 
 if Johnson in anger put down a little girl from his 
 knee, who had never read Pilgrim's Progress^ what 
 a frown would he have cast upon her whose tears of 
 joy do not trickle over the Glass Slipper ! Burke 
 expresses the sentiments of many hearts : — " I de- 
 spair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure 
 from the most exalted performances of genius, which 
 I felt at that age from pieces which my present 
 judgment regards as trifling and contemptible." 
 
 The first and the last days of life have, indeed, 
 one sentiment in common. A book interests in pro- 
 portion as it surprises us. When a friend entered the 
 library of Gray, he found him absorbed in the news- 
 paper. It contained the opening letter of Junius. 
 That venomous glitter of eye had the fascination of 
 a discovery. Boccaccio, climbing by a ladder to the 
 grass-grown loft of a monastery, to disinter a classic 
 fragment from the dusty parchments, and Petrarch 
 feasting his eyes on a ^uintilian — just brought into 
 daylight — exhibit the sentiment in a more agreeable 
 shape. The remark applies with" equal truth to 
 scenery, or any remains of antiquity : whether Raf- 
 faelle lingers over the outline of a Greek head upon 
 a medal, or Poussin recognizes some faintly-defined 
 feature of a leaf, by which he may give its portrait 
 with all the accuracy of a botanist. In each case the 
 key to the delight is to be found in the surprise ; so 
 far the boy and the sage read a book by the same 
 
l6 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 light. But, however lively may be the enjoyment 
 of* taste unexpectedly gratified, it is weak in com- 
 parison with that vivid sense and glow of happiness 
 and wonder, which quicken the pulse and brighten 
 the eye of intelligent childhood. It finds its feeling 
 unconsciously expressed by the poet, who spoke of 
 his own rapture and amazement on first looking into 
 Chapman's Homer : — 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, 
 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 
 Or like stout Cortes when, with eagle eyes, 
 
 He stared at the Pacific — and all the men 
 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise — 
 
 Silent upon a peak hi Darien." 
 
 The reader is surrounded by a new creation. The 
 poem and the tale in youth are like Adam's early 
 walk in the Garden. In the beautiful words of 
 Burke, c< The senses are unworn and tender, and 
 the whole frame is awake in every part." The dew 
 lies upon the grass. No smoke of busy life has 
 darkened or stained the morning of our day. The 
 pure light shines about us. If any little mist happen 
 to rise, the sunbeam of hope catches and paints 
 it. The cloudy weather melts in beauty, and the 
 brightest smiles of the heart are born of its tears. 
 
 A first book has some of the sweetness of a first 
 love. The music of the soul passes into it. The 
 unspotted eye illuminates it. Defects are unob- 
 served ; sometimes they grow even pleasing from 
 their connection with an object that is dear, like the 
 oblique eye in the girl to whom the philosopher was 
 attached. Later surprises will amuse, and deeper 
 sympathies may cheer us, but the charm loses its 
 freshness, and the tenderness some of the balm. 
 
ADVANTAGES, CF LITERATURE. If 
 
 Perhaps the loving admiration of Virgil, in what 
 are called the dark times of literature, may be ex- 
 plained on this principle. The dawn of civilization 
 is the childhood of a people. The JEneid was the 
 fairy tale, and Virgil was the enchanter of the middle 
 ages. The revival of learning gave to it all the 
 sparkle of surprise. A costly book was the home of 
 a Magician. It cast rays from every page, as from 
 a window. A scholar, winding out of mediaeval 
 ignorance, and coming suddenly upon one of these 
 illuminated Palaces of Fancy, was not unlike a way- 
 farer, whose dismal road of snow and tempest 
 brought him in the evening, fuli of joy and reve- 
 rence, to the gate of a lighted abbey. 
 
 V. — Taste, its Nature, and Charms. 
 
 Literature has two eyes — Taste and Criticism. 
 Without these the book is cold and dark as the 
 greenest landscape to a man who is blind. The best 
 definition of Taste was given by the earliest editor 
 of Spenser who proved himself to possess any, when 
 he called it a kind of extempore judgment. Burke's 
 view was not dissimilar. He explained it to be an 
 instinct which immediately awakes the emotion of 
 pleasure or dislike. Akenside is clear, as he is poe- 
 tical, in the question :— 
 
 " "What, then, is Taste but those internal powers 
 Active, and strong, and feelingly alive 
 To each fine impulse? a discerning sense 
 Of decent and sublime, with quick disgust 
 From things deformed, or disarranged, or gross, 
 In species ? This nor gems, nor stores of gold, 
 
 C 
 
IS PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Nor purple state, nor culture, can bestow, 
 But God alone, when first His sacred Hand 
 Imprints the secret bias of the soul." 
 
 We may consider Taste, therefore, to be a set- 
 tled habit of discerning faults and excellences in a 
 moment — the mind's independent expression of ap- 
 proval or aversion. It is that faculty by which we 
 discover and enjoy the beautiful, the picturesque, 
 and the sublime, in literature, art, and nature ; which 
 recognizes a noble thought as a virtuous mind wel- 
 comes a pure sentiment, by an involuntary glow of 
 .satisfaction. But while the principle of perception 
 is inherent in the soul, it requires a certain amount 
 of knowledge to draw out and direct it. The utter- 
 most ignorance has no curiosity. Captain Cook 
 met with some savages who entirely disregarded his 
 ship — the first they had ever seen — as it sailed by 
 them. 
 
 Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and 
 is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is 
 refined by religion. In its most advanced state it 
 takes the title of Judgment. Hume quotes Fonte- 
 nelle's ingenious distinction between the common 
 watch that tells the hours, and the delicately-con- 
 structed one that marks the seconds and smallest 
 differences of time. 
 
 A taste, enriched by observation and learning, 
 sensitive even to the tremble of the balance by which 
 the scale is suspended, is probably one of the most 
 desirable endowments of the mind. It enjoys some 
 of the humbler qualities of invention. It brings a 
 dim meaning into light, and not only beholds the 
 image, or the argument, but gazes beyond them into 
 
ADVANTAGE?, OF LITERATURE. 10, 
 
 the rudiments of their creation. It identifies itself 
 with the author ; sees what he saw, and feels what 
 he felt. It enters readily into the reply of Paul 
 Veronese to a person who asked him why some 
 figures appeared in shade — " A cloud is passing over 
 the sky, and darkens t^e picture." Another ex- 
 ample will show this power of Taste still more 
 clearly. In Raffaelle's " Burning of Borgho Vec- 
 chio," the dresses of the people who carry water 
 toss in the wind ; an ordinary observer perceives 
 nothing in the circumstance, but a finer sight learns 
 from it that the conflagration is rising with the gale, 
 and that the flames will conquer. 
 
 These forward, inward, and backward looks are 
 the motion and life of Taste. When that eye of the 
 intellect is closed, or injured, the majesty of Genius 
 is obscured, or broken. Men of brightest thoughts, 
 walking abroad in their books, are unknown by the 
 multitude. The Muse who inspired them conceals, 
 with a thick mist, their shape and features from the 
 rude stare of the bystanders — as the Olympian Lady 
 enveloped the Trojans in the palace of Dido — to 
 dawn upon the friendly and purified eyes of reflective 
 Taste, in the fresh bloom of beauty ,'and in the per- 
 fect gracefulness of form. 
 
 Moliere might read a comedy to his old servant, 
 and alter it according to the effect which it produced, 
 but her opinion could be useful only in sketches of 
 manners, or descriptions of vulgar feelings. Suppose 
 that the grandest pictures of Dante or iEschylus 
 had been exhibited, and her decision on their com- 
 parative merits desired ; the poet would have been 
 
20 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 a Judge leaving his court to consult the Crier on a 
 question of law. There is a familiar story of a 
 Scottish nobleman finding one of his shepherds in a 
 field poring over Paradise Lost, and asking him what 
 book he was reading — " Please your lordship," was 
 the answer, " this is a very odd sort of an author ; 
 he would fain rhyme, but cannot get at it." The 
 shepherd might have understood Allan Ramsay ; 
 Milton was out of his reach. 
 
 But not even to its own kindred has Genius been 
 always revealed. Horace censured Plautus. The 
 Library of Petrarch wanted the Divine Comedy, until 
 Boccaccio sent it decorated with gold. Daniel, a 
 contemporary of Spenser, and a versifier of much p 
 elegance, ridiculed the antique English of the Faery , 
 £hteen Walpole sneered at Thomson, and Gray 
 could satisfy himself with admitting the Castle of In- 
 dolence to contain " some good stanzas." Hurd re- 
 gretted that Milton had not written of angels in 
 rhyme ; Shenstone thought that Spenser might be 
 enjoyed in a humorous light. Blackmore was the 
 Homer of Locke. The critics of the Hotel de 
 Rambouillet, with Voiture at their head, predicted 
 the failure of Corneille ; and Patru, quite a leader of 
 fashion in books, dissuaded Fontaine from writing p 
 fables. 
 
 Jealousy may often explain blindness. When Le \ 
 Brun heard of the death of Le Sueur, he said that he 
 felt as if a thorn had just been taken out of his foot.- 
 Bellino warns Titian that he will never succeed in 
 painting; and Titian, crowned with fame, scowls- 
 upon the dawning honours of Tintoretto. Pordenone,; 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 21 
 
 at Venice, kept a shield and dagger by his side. Not 
 seldom the theologian, the poet, and the man of let- 
 ters, display the same temper. Bossuet condemns 
 the Telemachus of Fenelon ; Corneille doubts the 
 dramatic powers of Racine ; and Voltaire smiles con- 
 descendingly at the humour of Le Sage. 
 
 VI. — Taste, an Inheritance and a Fashion. 
 
 Taste has frequently an imaginary existence, un- 
 connected with the intellect. It is merely hereditary 
 or acquired, and descends from father to son with 
 his prejudices and estate. The manor-house, the 
 hounds, and Somerville, go together. Certain authors 
 are adopted into families. Bunyan has the sacred- 
 ness of a legacy; the songs of Watts are bound up 
 with earliest days at mothers' knees ; and Gray's 
 Elegy incloses a domestic interior of warmth and 
 affection in every stanza. There are hymns which 
 have been intoned through the noses of three genera- 
 tions, and will probably delight the coming age with 
 all the music and endearment of theL* ancestral twang. 
 In such cases the heart, not the understanding, is the 
 source of interest, and admiration is only a pleasure 
 of memory. 
 
 Taste is often one of the aspects of Fashion. 
 Folly borrows its mask, and walks out with Wisdom 
 arm-in-arm. Like virtues of greater dignity, it is 
 assumed. The furniture and decorations of a room 
 are arranged to indicate the serious and graceful sen- 
 
22 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 timents of the occupant. Bishop Sanderson looks 
 gravely on Petrarch through his gold frame. Boc- 
 caccio sparkles over a grim treatise of Calvin, and a 
 ruffle is smoothed in Aquinas. 
 
 Addison sketched a student of this order, in whose 
 library he found Locke On the Understanding with a 
 paper of patches among the leaves, and all the classic 
 authors — in wood, with bright backs. To such 
 readers, a new book of which people talk is like a 
 new costume which a person of celebrity has intro- 
 duced. It is the rage. Not to be acquainted with 
 it is to be ill dressed. The pleasure is not of Lite- 
 rature, but of vanity. The pretended taste is a polite 
 fraud of society. 
 
 When a fashion of this kind happens to spread, it 
 takes the character of a disease, raging and vanishing 
 with the virulence and speed of an epidemic. Marino 
 in Italy, Gongora in Spain, and Cowley in England, 
 are varieties of the same type. Butler, sitting with 
 his chaplain, as his habit was, in a deep reverie, sud- 
 denly started up, with the exclamation, " Surely 
 whole bodies of men sometimes lose their wits as 
 instantaneously as an individual does ! " The 
 Bishop's conjecture might very well illustrate the 
 breaking out of a popular fever in things concerning 
 Taste. 
 
 This, like other attacks of delirium, is unmanage- 
 able while it lasts. Its will is absolute. Reynolds 
 assured Northcote, that in the beginning of his own 
 career the fame of Kneller was so universal, that a 
 connoisseur presuming to suggest a competitor in 
 Vandyck, would have been laughed to scorn 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 23 
 
 Spence's criticism on the Odyssey was pronounced 
 by persons of reputation to be superior to Addison's 
 papers on Milton. It is pleasant to know that 
 sooner or later the fever departs, and Taste recovers 
 the tone of health. Sixty years ago we meet with 
 Kasselas, Telemachus, Cyrus^ and Marcus Flaminius^ 
 moving as equals in fortune and rank. The authors 
 had passed their examination for honours, and were 
 sent before the world in brackets. Time has changed 
 their places in the calender. Johnson and Fenelon 
 are household words, but who speaks of Sir Charles 
 Ramsay, or Cornelia Knight ? 
 
 Two other peculiarities may be noticed in the 
 natural history of Taste. The first is the strong 
 propensity in most people to make themselves and 
 their views the measure of excellence. The sceni- 
 cal De Stael, always on the watch for a stage effect, 
 complained that Spenser was the most tedious writer 
 in the world. Nor is the error confined to indi- 
 viduals. It is national. A country grows its taste 
 like its fruit. Germany and romance inspire 
 Schlegel ; England and good sense rule Mr. Hallam. 
 Read and contrast those two characters of 7 a famous 
 tragedy. " Why," asks Schlegel, " does the Romeo 
 of Shakspeare stand so far above all the other dramas 
 of that poet, except that in the first delightful gush 
 of youthful passion he deemed that work a fitting 
 shrine for the outpouring of his emotion, with which 
 the entire poem thus became filled and interpene- 
 trated ?" " It may be said," observes Mr. Hallam, 
 " that few^ if any of his plays are more open to rea- 
 sonable censure ; and we are almost equally struck 
 
24 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 by its excellences and its defects. The love of 
 Romeo is that of the most bombastic commonplace 
 of gallantry, and the young lady differs only in being 
 one degree more mad." Were two voices ever 
 heard more contrary or positive? 
 
 The second peculiarity resides in what may be 
 characterized as the Taste of the Market. In an 
 age of high civilization, a publisher is a manufac- 
 turer. He supplies the demand, but rarely creates 
 it Helvetius has an amusing story of a person ap- 
 pearing before a tribunal and describing himself as a 
 maker of books. The judge pleaded ignorance of 
 his productions. " I quite believe you," answered 
 the author, with tranquillity ; " I write nothing for 
 Paris. When my book is printed, I send the edition 
 to America. I only compose for the Colonies." 
 He who addresses his own century, and flatters its 
 caprices, will probably be as unknown in the next, 
 as the scribbler for remote countries was in Paris. 
 
 VII. — A Pure and Cultivated Taste 
 
 SELDOM FOUND. 
 
 Shenstone said that if the world were divided into 
 one hundred parts, persons of original taste, edu- 
 cated by art, would only form a twentieth portion of 
 the whole. Popular opinion is the old fable of the 
 lion's great supper. The delicacies of the forest 
 were spread before the guests ; but the swine asked, 
 " Have you no grains ? " The most unpleasing 
 shape of bad Taste is a flippant confidence, with a 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 2$ 
 
 strong show of appreciation. An entertaining French 
 writer relates an experiment he made upon the mu- 
 sical feelings of animals. The spectator altogether 
 unmoved was the one which outwardly had the 
 most ear. He munched his thistles, and took no 
 notice at all. 
 
 Dryden was certain, if Virgil and Martial had 
 stood for a county, that the epigrammatist would 
 have carried the election ; but he consoled himself 
 by reflecting that in matters of Taste the applause of 
 the mob is altogether worthless, and that, not having 
 lands of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, they 
 are not privileged to poll. 
 
 Johnson enumerated three classes of literary 
 judges : — (i.) Those who give their opinion from 
 impulse and feeling ; (2 ) Those who measure a line 
 or a paragraph by rules alone; (3,) And those who, 
 being familiar with the laws of composition, and 
 skilful in applying them, are independent of all. He 
 advised an author to try and satisfy the third class, 
 to esteem the first, but to despise and reject the 
 second. His judgment is upheld by distinguished 
 authorities. " Whoever writes or acts bf system," 
 is a remark of Payne Knight, " may stand a chance 
 of being uniformly and invariably wrong." That 
 which pleases a refined and a reflective reader must 
 be good, although the artillery of criticism be played 
 upon it. The falling tear blots out Aristotle. 
 
 The most philosophical critic of the eighteenth 
 century perceived that graceful and imaginative com- 
 position should be estimated chiefly by its impression 
 upon the mind. Shaftesbury recommended an au- 
 
26 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 thor to assemble the best forces of his wit, in order 
 to make an assault on the territories of the heart. 
 Reynolds spoke of taste as depending on those finer 
 emotions which make the organization of the soul. 
 Nor is a remark of Alison undeserving of remem- 
 brance, that the exercise of criticism always destroys 
 for a time our sensibility to beauty, by leading us to 
 regard the work in relation to certain laws of con- 
 struction. The eye turns from the charms of 
 Nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of Art. 
 
 The unconscious testimony of Gray may be 
 added. When he sent his Ode on the Progress of 
 Poetry to Dr. Warton, he requested him not to 
 show it to mere scholars, who could scan the mea- 
 sures of Pindar, and say the Scholia by heart. 
 
 Literature is a garden, books are particular views 
 of it, and readers are visitors. Much of their plea- 
 sure depends on the guides. It is very important to 
 obtain the assistance of those only who are familiar 
 with the beauties they show, and able, from feeling 
 and practice, to appreciate lights, and shades, and 
 colours. Of this small band Gilpin is a remarkable 
 instance. How happily he clears a passage in the 
 Iliad which learning had left in obscurity. 
 
 Homer distinguishes Jupiter by a peculiarity of 
 forehead ; Gilpin shows us that the poet intended 
 to portray the projecting brow, which casts a broad 
 shadow over the eye. His interpretation is ex- 
 tremely picturesque, and may be compared with 
 Spenser's description of the Dragon : — 
 
 ''But far within, as in a hollow glade, 
 Those glowing lamps were set, that made a dreadful shade." 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1J 
 
 Here is another example. Virgil paints a ship in 
 full sail, and losing sight of the line of coast it is 
 leaving : — 
 
 '* Protinus aerias Phaeacum abscondimus arces." 
 
 In the eyes of scholastic readers, u aerial" is only 
 a synonyme for " tall." But a receding object does 
 not suggest merely elevation. Taste again holds up 
 its lamp. Gilpin conjectures that Virgil, who above 
 all poets enjoyed the artistic eye, intending to indi- 
 cate colour rather than shape, represented the towers 
 bathed in that soft blue of distance, which gives the 
 faint azure tinge to mountain scenery. 
 
 This delicacy of discrimination communicates a 
 charm to the Essays of Uvedale Price, which will 
 do more to form a true feeling for the beautiful than 
 any single book in the English language. Twining 
 is a younger member of the same family. One 
 specimen will be interesting. Speaking of sounds, 
 and the opportunities which they afford of descrip- 
 tive imitation, he refers to Milton's "curfew," 
 
 " Over some wide-watered shore, 
 Swinging slow with sullen roar ;" 
 
 and teaches us not to consider " swinging," as ex- 
 pressing only the motion of the bell, but to feel that 
 its swing is actually heard in its tone, " which is 
 different from what it would be if the same bell were 
 struck with the same force, but at rest." 
 
 The elegance of Gilpin, the graceful knowledge 
 of Price, the sensibility of Twining, and the poeti- 
 cal refinement of the Wartons, are exceptions among 
 commentators. A correction, or a note, is too often 
 out of harmony with the passage explained or 
 
28 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 amended. A glowing verse of Shakspere becomes 
 dreary in a moment. The sun goes in, when Maratti 
 retouches the picture of Titian. 
 
 It may be regretted, that a large capacity and vi- 
 gorous imagination are so seldom accompanied by 
 Taste. The tender blossom of fancy faded in the 
 hard pressure of Warburton. He has become his 
 own accuser in the annotation he wrote upon these 
 two lines of Shapspeare : — 
 
 "And cuckow-buds of yellow hue 
 Do paint the meadows with delight j" 
 
 a description so rural and easy, that we might have 
 expected it to escape even the predatory pen of a 
 commentator. Hear Warburton : — " I would read 
 thus — c Do paint the meadows much bedight^ u e, 
 much bedecked and adorned^ as they are in spring- 
 time. ' " Yet, if they are much bedight already, 
 they do not require to be painted. The image has 
 two sides. One looks to the eye ; the other to the 
 feelings. The emotional appeal is the more affect- 
 ing. But Warburton runs his pen through it, for- 
 getting how that tuneful friend, whom he delighted 
 tc honour, had lashed the conjecturing tribe ; — 
 
 " Whose unwearied pains 
 Made Horace dull, and humbled Maro's strains." 
 
 The lovers of Shakspere will hope that the last 
 revision of his works is inflicted. His poetry has 
 been too long the orchard of editors, who leave dis- 
 astrous proofs of their activity in trunks stripped of 
 ivy, shattered boughs, and trampled enclosures. 
 Some squalid article of intellectual dress, which 
 they call an emendation, sticking among the rich 
 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 20, 
 
 fruit, proclaims the plunderer to have been up in the 
 tree. It happens, indeed, that the sentiment of 
 anger is occasionally softened by a sense of the 
 ridiculous. One adventurer has no sooner packed 
 up his little bundle of pillage, than he is waylaid by 
 a fierce contemporary on the opposite side. Then 
 begin the clamour, the reproach, and the struggle. 
 Pamphlets are hurled ; satirical blows are showered; 
 the quarrel waxes furious : 
 
 " Collect! flores tunicis cecidere remissis " 
 
 The assertion of Bacon, that the most corrected 
 copies of an author are commonly the least correct, 
 may advantageously be stamped as an introductory 
 motto for every copy of Shalcspere. 
 
 VIII. — Taste puts an Author in a proper 
 Light. 
 
 A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. 
 People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or 
 adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting 
 and magnifying the page. It was a pleasant sarcasm 
 of Selden, that the alchemist discovered his art in 
 Virgil's golden bough, and the optician his science 
 in the Annals of Tacitus. When juries of Taste 
 are thus empanelled, an author may fairly claim a 
 right of challenge. Passion and self-love corrupt 
 verdicts. What judge would Milton have been of 
 Cowley's discourse upon Cromwell ? Calvin, 
 breathing flames and threats against Servetus, found 
 a heresy in every line of his treatises. Trublet had 
 
30 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 a contemporary whose periods of contradiction 
 came round in their order. To-day Corneille was 
 despicable, to-morrow the prince of poets. 
 
 It is not enough for a reader to be unprejudiced. 
 He should remember that a book is to be studied, 
 as a picture is hung. Not only must a bad 
 light be avoided, but a good one obtained. This 
 Taste supplies. It puts a history, a tale, or a poem, 
 in a just- point of view, and there examines the 
 execution. It causes the reader to forget himself; 
 his own century vanishes. He goes out of the 
 familiar into the heroic ; rides with the Cid ; laces 
 the helmet of Surrey ; and flings himself among the 
 magnificent knights of Tasso. His pulse beats with 
 every impulse of delight and sorrow ; he braves the 
 tempest with Lear, endures the picturesque torments 
 of Dante, and sinks into delicious dreams in the 
 Castle of Indolence. These are some of the pleasures 
 of a poetical faith, which every accomplished reader 
 encourages. In a theatre a candle is the sun, and a 
 painted cloth stands for Venice. The credulity of 
 Taste gives the like help to the illusions of authors, 
 and never sits down in the same temper to the won- 
 ders of Camoens and the statistics of M'Culloch. 
 
 If an architect were to fix a ladder against a 
 cathedral window on a dull November day, and 
 break up with sharp scrutiny the crimson dress and 
 giory of the saint, the artist's powers would dis- 
 appear. Colour and expression are gone. The 
 maker of the window never contemplated such an 
 ordeal. 
 
 He who disregards the object and the character of 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 3 1 
 
 a book, inflicts on its writer an equal wrong. Con- 
 sider Spenser. He calls his Faery £>ueen a perpetual 
 allegory, or dark conceit. It should be read under 
 the bright play of the moral, which is the sun to the 
 window. In censuring the obscurity of the poem, 
 we forget that its illumination is coloured. It is the 
 \ustre of a ruby, not a crystal. Each thought is 
 tinged by the allegory into a hue of imagination, as 
 the sun in the cathedral is dyed by the glass into 
 stains of amethyst and emerald. The critic who 
 decomposes a stanza into common sense, is the 
 architect spelling out upon his ladder the wonders of 
 the window, instead of gazing up to it from the dim 
 choir, when summer or autumn lights bathe the 
 faces and the drapery from behind. 
 
 No window gives all its splendours at once. It 
 must be visited often. A morning or afternoon 
 gleam sheds a different tincture. Moonlight wakes 
 a solemn charm of its own. Winckelmann wished 
 to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying 
 is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from 
 Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of 
 Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. 
 The conjecture had only a poetical boldness, which 
 supposed that a student might linger over Shakspere, 
 dwelling upon him line by line, and word by word, 
 until the mind, steeped in brilliancy, would almost 
 scatter light in the dark. 
 
 Whoever has spent many days in the company or 
 choice pictures, will remember the surprises that 
 often reward him. When the sun strikes an evening 
 scene by Both, or Berghem, in a particular direc- 
 
32 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 tion, the change is swift and dazzling. Every touch 
 of the pencil begins to live. Buried figures arise ; 
 purple robes look as if they had just been dyed ; 
 cattle start up from dusky corners ; trunks of trees 
 flicker with gold ; leaves flutter in light ; and a soft, 
 shadowy gust — sun and breeze together — plays over 
 the grass. But the charm is fleeting, as it is vivid. 
 In a few minutes the sun sinks lower, or a cloud 
 rolls over it ; the scene melts, the figures grow dark, 
 and the whole landscape faints and dies into coldness 
 and gloom. 
 
 Life has its gay, hopeful hours which lend to the 
 book a lustre, not less delightful than the accidents or 
 sunshine breathe upon the picture. Every mind is 
 sometimes dull. The magician of the morning may 
 be the beggar of the afternoon. Now the sky or 
 thought is black and cheerless ; presently it v/ill be 
 painted with beauty, or spangled with stars. Taste 
 varies with temper and health. There are minutes 
 when the song of Fletcher is not sweeter than Pom- 
 fret's. The reader must watch for the sunbeam. 
 Elia puts this difficulty in a pleasant form, and 
 shows us that our sympathy with the writer is 
 affected by the time, or the mood in which we 
 become acquainted with him : — " In the five or six li 
 impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, k 
 who would think of taking up the Faery Queen for 
 a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' ser- 
 mons ? Milton almost requires a solemn service to 
 be played before you enter upon him." Only a 
 zealot in Political Economy begins Adam Smith 
 before breakfast j and he must be fast growing be- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 33 
 
 numbed in metaphysics who wishes Cudworth to 
 come in with the dessert. 
 
 A celebrated author is reported to have said, " I 
 know not how it is, but all my philosophy in which 
 I was so warmly engaged in the morning, appears 
 like nonsense as soon as I have dined." Perhaps 
 Ariosto selected an unpropitious hour when he pre- 
 sented his Orlando to the Cardinal D'Este, and was 
 startled by the inquiry of his Eminence, " Whence 
 had he gathered such a heap of fooleries ? " 
 
 The man of taste, therefore, will choose his book, 
 so far as he may, according to the season and his 
 own disposition at the moment ; waiting for the 
 rays that occasionally dart from it, in some happy 
 transparency and warmth of the mind, as the lover 
 of pictures looks for the flush of sunset on the can- 
 vas. By degrees he comes to know that every 
 writer makes a certain demand upon his reader. 
 This is emphatically true of those inquiries or con- 
 solations which concern the soul. That ancient 
 Master who always rose from his knees to his 
 pencil, suggests the tone of mind. The serenity of 
 Wordsworth's grandest verse is not for him who re- 
 ceives a box of twenty new volumes every week ; 
 but for the serious, musing man, who sits at his own 
 door, and 
 
 " Like the pear, 
 That overhangs his head from the green wall, 
 Feeds in the sunshine." 
 
34 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 IX. — Books which are adapted to different 
 
 Seasons. 
 
 Johnson at dinner sometimes kept a book in his lap, 
 wrapped up in a corner of the table-cloth ; and 
 Hammond always took one of these mute friends 
 to cheer his walks. Southey divided them into three 
 classes : one for the table, a second for the fields, 
 and a third for the coach. A closely-printed volume, 
 full of texts, which the mind worked into sermons, 
 was the favourite for a journey. The Colloquies of 
 Erasmus stood him " in good stead " for more than 
 one excursion ; and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More 
 was found serviceable for another. Dr. Warton 
 had a friend who, after reading a book of the Dunciad y 
 always soothed himself with a canto of Spenser. 
 
 A classification of authors to suit all hours and 
 weathers might be amusing. Ariosto spans a wet 
 afternoon like a rainbow. North winds and sleet 
 agree with Junius. The visionary tombs of Dante 
 glimmer into awfuller perspective by moonlight. 
 Crabbe is never so pleasing as on the hot shingle, P 
 when we can look up from his verses at the sleepy 
 sea, and count the 
 
 u Crimson weeds, which spreading flow, 
 Or lie like pictures on the sands below : 
 With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun 
 Through the small waves so softly shines upon." 
 
 Some books come in with lamps, and curtains, and 
 fresh logs. An evening in late autumn, when there 
 is no moon, and the boughs toss like foam raking its 
 way back down a pebbly shore, is just the time for 
 Undine. A voyage is read with deepest interest in 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 35 
 
 winter, while the hail dashes against the window. 
 Southey speaks of this delight : — 
 
 " 'Tis pleasant by the cheerful hearth to hear 
 Of tempests and the dangers of the deep, 
 And pause at times, and feel that we are safe 5 
 And with an eager and suspended soul, 
 Woo terror to delight us." 
 
 The sobs of the storm are musical chimes for a 
 ghost-story, or one of those fearful tales with which 
 the blind fiddler in Redgauntlet made " the auld car- 
 lines shake on the settle, and the bits of bairns skirl 
 on their minnies out frae their beds." 
 
 Shakspere is always most welcome at the chim- 
 ney-corner : so is Goldsmith : who does not wish 
 Dr. Primrose to call in the evening, and Olivia to 
 preside at the urn ? Elia affirms that there is no 
 such thing as reading, or writing, but by a candle ; 
 he is confident that Milton composed the morning 
 hymn of Eden with a clear fire burning in the room ; 
 and in Taylor's gorgeous description of sunrise he 
 found the smell of the lamp quite overpowering. A 
 living poet has charmingly sketched a family group 
 enjoying the evening pleasures of literature : — 
 
 *' At night, when all assembling round the fire, 
 Closer and closer draw till they retire, 
 A tale is told of India or Japan, 
 Of merchants from Golcond or Astracan, 
 What time wild Nature revelled unrestrained, 
 And Sinbad voyaged, and the Caliphs reigned j — 
 Of Knight renowned from holy Palestine, 
 And Minstrels, such as swept the lyre divine, 
 When Blondel came, and Richard in his cell 
 Heard, as he lay, the song he knew so well ; — ■ 
 Of some Norwegian, while the icy gale 
 Rings in her shrouds, and beats her iron sail, 
 Among the shining Alps of Polar seas 
 Immoveable — for ever there to freeze ! 
 And now to Venice — to a bridge, a square, 
 Glittering with light — all nations masking there, 
 
35 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 With light reflected on the tremulous tide, 
 Where gondolas in gay contusion glide, 
 Answering the jest, the song on every side." 
 
 But Elia carried his fireside theory too far. Some 
 people have tried "the affectation of a book at noon- 
 day in gardens and sultry arbours," without finding 
 their task of love to be unlearnt. Indeed, many 
 books belong to sunshine, and should be read out-of- 
 doors. Clover, violets, and hedge-roses, breathe 
 from their leaves ; they are most loveable in cool 
 lanes, along field-paths, or upon stiles overhung by 
 hawthorn ; while the blackbird pipes, and the night- 
 ingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse. 
 In such haunts it is soothing to wander with 
 Thomson, Bloomfield, or Clare, in the hand, 
 
 " Till declining day, 
 Through the green trellis shoots a crimson ray." 
 
 The sensation is heightened when an author is 
 read amid the scenery or the manners which he 
 describes ; as Barrow studied the sermons of Chry- 
 sostom in his own See of Constantinople. What 
 daisies sprinkle the walks of Cowper, if we take his 
 Task for a companion through the lanes of Weston ! 
 Under the thick hedges of Horton, darkening either 
 bank of the field in the September moonlight, // 
 Penseroso is still more pensive. And whoever would 
 feel at his heart the deep pathos of Collins's lamenta- 
 tion for Thomson, must murmur it to himself as 
 he glides upon the stealing wave, by the breezy lawns 
 and elms of Richmond — 
 
 " When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, 
 And oft suspend the dashing oar, 
 To bid his gentle spirit rest." 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 37 
 
 X. — Diligence the Handmaid of Taste. 
 
 Whether a book be read from the oak lectern of a 
 college library, in the parlour window, or beneath 
 the trees of summer, no fruit will be gathered unless 
 the thoughts are steadily given up to the perusal. 
 Attention makes the genius ; all learning, fancy, and 
 science, depend upon it. Newton traced back his 
 discoveries to its unwearied employment. It builds 
 bridges, opens new worlds, and heals diseases 5 
 without it Taste is useless, and the beauties of litera- 
 ture are unobserved ; as the rarest flowers bloom in 
 vain, if the eye be not fixed upon the bed. 
 
 Condillac enforces this habit of patience by an 
 apt similitude. He supposes a traveller to arrive in 
 the dark at a castle, which commands large views of 
 the surrounding scenery. If with sunrise the shutters 
 be unclosed for a moment, and then fastened, he 
 catches a glimpse of the landscape, but no object is 
 clearly seen or remembered — all wavers in a con- 
 fusion of light and shade. But if the windows be 
 kept open, the visitor receives and retains a strong 
 impression of the woods, fields, and villages, that 
 are spread before his eyes. 
 
 The application of the comparison is obvious, 
 Every noble book is a stronghold of the mind, built 
 upon some high place of contemplation, and over- 
 looking wide tracts of intellectual country. The 
 unacquainted reader may be the traveller coming in 
 the dark ; sunrise will represent the dawn of his 
 comprehension ; and a drowsy indifference is ex- 
 plained by the closing of the windows. In whatever 
 
38 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 degree this languor of observation is broken, gleams 
 will break in upon the mind. But the shutters must 
 be fastened back. The judgment and the memory- 
 are required in their fulness to irradiate the subject, 
 before the mental prospect stretching over the page 
 can appear in its length, and breadth, and beauty. 
 
 Attention is not often the talent of early life. For 
 this cause, the exquisite verses of Virgil which are 
 read in schools, excite little, if any, interest and 
 delight. It was remarked by a most accomplished 
 person, the late Mr. Davison, that the Principia of 
 Newton, or the doctrine of Fluxions, may be under- 
 stood by a youth of eighteen ; but that the Iliad, the 
 Epistles of Horace, or the History of Clarendon, 
 can never be embraced, until repeated efforts on the 
 part of the reader himself shall have conducted him 
 to that point of view, in which the writers contem- 
 plated their own works. 
 
 There is one variety of attention, which the 
 humblest student may acquire. Gassendi informs 
 us that Peiresc always underlined any difficult pas- 
 sage, that he might return to it at a convenient 
 season. Wyttenbach mentions the same practice 
 in Ruhnken. Leibnitz made extracts, wrote his 
 opinion upon them, and then cast the papers aside. 
 Having engraved the picture on his memory, he 
 destroyed the plate. The advice of a scholar, whose 
 piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is 
 never to be forgotten : Proportion an hour's reflec- 
 tion to an hour's reading, and so dispirit the book 
 into the student. Nor is the following caution less 
 happy than it is quaint : — " Marshal thy notions 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LiTERATURE. 39 
 
 into a handsome method. One will carry twice as 
 much weight, trussed and packed up in bundles, than 
 when it lies untoward, flapping and hanging about 
 his shoulders." 
 
 Lamb prided himself on being able to read any- 
 thing which in his heart he felt to be a book. He 
 had no antipathies. Shaftesbury was not too genteel,, 
 nor Fielding too familiar. Pope confessed his own 
 miscellaneous amusements in letters, knocking at 
 any door, as the storm drove. Montaigne and 
 Locke were alike to him. The example is danger- 
 ous. A discursive student is almost certain to fall 
 into bad company. Homes of entertainment, scien- 
 tific and romantic, are always open to a man who is 
 trying to escape from his thoughts. But a shelter 
 from the tempest is dearly bought in the house of the 
 plague. Ten minutes with a French novel, or a 
 German rationalist, have sent a reader away with 
 a fever for life. 
 
 Ac the first glance, all study might seem to be 
 wasted which is not devoted to the greatest writer in 
 each particular branch of knowledge ; but considera- 
 tion shows the bold attempt to be useless. The 
 exertion of mind is too much for its strength. A 
 scholar of the average capacity reading an author of 
 the sublimest, is a man of the common size going 
 up a hill with a giant : every step is a strain ; the 
 easy walk of the one is the full speed of the other. 
 Frequent intervals of rest are needed. He must 
 come down from the high argument into the plain. 
 Over a dozen pages of Bloomfield he recovers from 
 the fatigue of a morning's journey with Dante ; and 
 
40 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 a sermon of Blair gives him breath for another climb 
 with Hooker. 
 
 We may generalize Ben Jonson's advice to a poet 
 about the choice of a master, to be honoured and 
 followed until he grows very He. It is certainly 
 better to set up one great light in a room, than to 
 make it twinkle with a dozen tapers. Dante had 
 his Virgil ; Corneille his Lucan ; Barrow his Chry- 
 sostom ; Bossuet his Homer ; Chatham his Demos- 
 thenes, in a translation ; Gray his Spenser. It is a 
 remark of Warburton that Burke never wrote so 
 well as when he imitated Bolingbroke. Tonson, the 
 bookseller, seldom called upon Addison without find- 
 ing Bayle's Dictionary on the table. And in our own 
 times, Lamb assured Mr. Cary, that Coleridge fed | 
 himself on Collins. " I guess good housekeeping," 
 was the saying of Fuller, " not by the number of 
 chimneys, but by the smoke." Ben Jonson's ex- 
 hortation, therefore, may be received, but only in a 
 large and liberal spirit. Reverence is not to be de- 
 based into superstition. Choose an old field, and 
 work in it ; but never sink into the serf of the pro- 
 prietor. Be the lord, while you are the tiller, of the 
 ground. Recollect the warning of Pliny, and bind a 
 'aurel upon the plough. 
 
 XL — Criticism, its Curiosities and 
 Researches. 
 
 Criticism is Taste put into action. A true criti- 
 cism is the elegant expression of a just judgment. 
 It includes Taste, of which it is the exponent and 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 41 
 
 the supplement. The frame of Genius, with its 
 intricate construction and mysterious economy, is 
 the subject of study. The finest nerve of sensa- 
 tion may not be overlooked. But Criticism must 
 never be sharpened into anatomy. The delicate 
 veins of Fancy may be traced, and the rich blood that 
 gives bloom and health to the complexion of thought 
 be resolved into its elements. Stop there. The life 
 of the imagination, as of the body, disappears when 
 we pursue it. 
 
 Many pleasures and some advantages of literature 
 are bound up in the name of Criticism. Its history 
 would be the annals of the mind. An acquaintance 
 with it is scarcely less necessary to the student than 
 the alphabet of antiquities is to the traveller. The 
 Divine Comedy should have its hand-book, as well as 
 the Coliseum. Criticism is introduced in this dis- 
 course only as it relates to the intellectual gratifica- 
 tion of readers, and the examples offered are merely 
 short aids to reflection. 
 
 One interesting feature of Criticism is seen in the 
 ease with which it discovers what Addison called the 
 specific quality of an author. In Livy, it will be the 
 manner of telling the story ; in Sallust, personal 
 identification with the character; in Tacitus, the 
 analysis of the deed into its motive. If the same 
 test be applied to painters, it will find the prominent 
 faculty of Correggio to be manifested in harmony of 
 effect ; of Poussin, in the sentiment of his land- 
 scapes ; and of Raffaelle, in the general comprehen- 
 sion of his subject. 
 
 The popular characters of authors are frequently 
 
42 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 only vulgar errors. They are copies of portraits for 
 which the poet or the historian never sat. We have 
 an example in Pindar. During how many years has 
 he been called the tumultuous, the ungovernable ; as 
 if his fiery and unbroken fancy, scorning the rein, 
 continually ran away with his judgment. Yet Pindar 
 is as methodical as Collins, or Gray. To borrow 
 an illustration from his own races, he has his thoughts 
 always in hand, and their fiercest plunges only carry 
 the chariot nearer to the goal. 
 
 A single thread guides the critical eye through a 
 labyrinth of character. It infers the lowly station, 
 as it might prove the ancientness of Homer from 
 internal evidence. He tells us what a thing cost. 
 Some pages of the Iliad are a priced catalogue. In 
 the style of Virgil the intimation of rank is equally 
 plain. He retreats from all contact with poverty. 
 In the herdsman's hut, or under a tree with a shep- 
 herd, he has the air of a person of quality, unbending 
 into simplicity and bucolics. He receives a maple 
 cup from a peasant with the grace of a courtier, who 
 is thinking all the time upon the last amphora which 
 Mecaenas opened. 
 
 The history of Crabbe offers a proof of this pene- 
 tration. Lord Jeffrey had remarked of his similes 
 that, ingenious and elaborate as they are, they seemed 
 to be the thoughtful productions of a busy and 
 watchful fancy, rather than the spontaneous growth 
 of a heated imagination. The poet admitted the 
 conjecture to be well founded : — " Jeffrey is quite 
 right ; my usual method has been to think of such 
 illustrations, and insert them after finishing a tale." 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 43 
 
 An agreeable function of Criticism is exercised in 
 the recognition of a picture, or a book, by some 
 distinctive expression which is ascertained to belong 
 to a particular workman. A connoisseur lays his 
 hand on Mieris without hesitation. He carries the 
 catalogue in his eye down a gallery; spelling Rem- 
 brandt in shadows, while the deep purple of a dis- 
 tance prepares him for Poussin. 
 
 The most original genius has a favourite formula. 
 In Titian it is a crimson cap ; in Tintoretto, the 
 lowering face of a Moor; in Wouverman, a white 
 horse ; in Domenichino, an angel ; in N. Berghem, 
 a woman riding on an ass ; in Hobbema, the dewy 
 lustre of trees. Cuyp glows all over in a haze or 
 warmth, and the liule farce upon canvas discloses 
 Jan Steen. Even amid the inexhaustible fruitfulness 
 of Rubens, Reynolds recognized one smooth, flat 
 face, continually recurring. Every "Madonna" of 
 RafFaelle is descended from the same type. The 
 high, smooth, round, forehead, with the thin hair, 
 re-appears in each change of posture and expression. 
 The Dutch artist is the most striking instance of all. 
 Under his hand, the river of Eden is a canal ; and 
 he builds Babylon upon piles. 
 
 Authors afford equaf opportunities to critical dis- 
 cernment. A phrase, or an epithet in a book, is a 
 particular hue, or shade, of a picture, It identifies 
 the writer. We know a Chaucer, as we know a 
 Van Eyck. St. Paul uses one word twenty-six 
 times, and it occurs in no other part of the New 
 Testament, except in the parable of the Barren Fig- 
 Tree, South is discovered immediately by the 
 
44 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 lash of a sentence, and Andrewes by the mechanism 
 of his exposition. A costly Latinism encircles the 
 gold of Taylor ; and the rising incense of devotion — 
 sweeter than any odours of poetry — assures a reader 
 that he is bending over a homily of Leighton. 
 
 Pope wished to have translated Homer in Asia, 
 with present life to enlighten the past. In our days, 
 he might have brought all Persia to his lawn. The 
 printing-press has made Criticism a citizen of every 
 kingdom. It is naturalised in antiquity. It talks 
 with Aristotle* and lives with Cuvier. Every 
 harvest-field of learning is to be gleaned. No frag- 
 ment of information is without a value. If a colour 
 and a word establish the relationship of a picture and 
 a book, a single fact in natural history may suffice 
 to disprove it. Take a simple instance. The Ba- 
 trachomuomach'ia was long circulated with the Ho- 
 meric poems ; but criticism is prepared to pronounce 
 it spurious, from finding in it a reference to the 
 cock. That bird is not mentioned in the Iliad or 
 Odyssey^ and is supposed to have been a stranger in 
 Greece, until the soldiers of Alexander brought 
 home the jungle-fowl of India, and domesticated it 
 in Europe. 
 
 Criticism pursues with lively interest the winding 
 and contrary paths, by which gifted men have 
 travelled to fame. Genius is the instinct of enter- 
 prise. A boy came to Mozart, wishing to compose 
 something, and inquiring the way to begin. Mozart 
 told him to wait. " You composed much earlier." 
 " But asked nothing about it," replied the musician. 
 M. Angelo is hindered in his childish studies of art ; 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 45 
 
 RafFaelle grows up with pencil and colours for play- 
 things : one neglects school to copy drawings, which 
 he dared not to bring home ; the father of the other 
 takes a journey to find his son a worthier teacher. 
 M. Angelo forces his way ; RafFaelle is guided into 
 it. But each looks for it with longing eyes. In 
 some way or other, the man is tracked in the little 
 footsteps of the child. Dryden marks the three 
 steps of progress : — 
 
 " What the child admired, 
 The youth endeavoured, and the man ACQUIRED." 
 
 Dryden was an example of his own theory. He 
 read Polybius, with a notion of his historic exact- 
 ness, before he was ten years old. Witnesses rise 
 over the whole field of learning. Pope, at twelve, 
 feasted his eyes in the picture-galleries of Spenser. 
 Murillo filled the margin of his school-books with 
 drawings. Le Brun, in the beginning of childhood, 
 drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the 
 house. The young Ariosto quietly watched the 
 fierce gestures of his father, forgetting his displeasure 
 in the joy of copying from life, into a comedy he was 
 writing, the manner and speech of an old man en- 
 raged with his son. 
 
 Cowley, in the history of his own mind, shows 
 the influence of boyish fancies upon later life. He 
 compares them to letters cut in the bark of a young 
 tree, which grow and widen with it. We are not 
 surprised to hear from a schoolfellow of the Chan- 
 cellor Somers that he was a weakly boy, who always 
 had a book in his hand, and never looked up at the 
 play of his companions ; to learn from his affection- 
 
46 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 ate biographer, that Hammond at Eton sought op- 
 portunities of stealing away to say his prayers ; to 
 read that Tournefort forsook his college class, that 
 he might search for plants in the neighbouring fields ; 
 or that Smeaton, in petticoats, was discovered on 
 the top of his father's barn, in the act of fixing the 
 model of a windmill which he had constructed. 
 These early traits of character are such as we expect 
 to find in the cultivated lawyer, who turned the eyes 
 of his age upon Milton; in the Christian, whose life 
 was one varied strain of devout praise j in the natu- 
 ralist, who enriched science by his discoveries ; and 
 in the engineer, who built the Eddystone Lighthouse. 
 
 The instinct of enterprise is combined with the 
 instinct of labour. Genius lights its own fire ; but 
 it is constantly collecting materials to keep alive the 
 flame. When a new publication was suggested to 
 Addison, after the completion of the Guardian^ he 
 answered, "I must now take some time, pour me 
 delasser^ and lay in fuel for a future work." The 
 strongest blaze soon goes out when a man always 
 blows and never feeds it. Johnson declined an intro- 
 duction to a popular author with the remark, that he 
 did not desire to converse with a person who had 
 written more than he had read. 
 
 It is interesting to follow great authors or painters 
 in their careful training and accomplishing of the 
 mind. The long morning of life is spent in making 
 the weapons and the armour, which manhood and 
 age are to polish and prove. Usher, when only 
 twenty years old, formed the daring resolution of 
 reading all the Greek and Latin Fathers, and with 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 47 
 
 the dawn of his thirty-ninth year he completed the 
 task. Hammond, at Oxford, gave thirteen hours of 
 the day to philosophy and classical literature, wrote 
 commentaries on all, and compiled indexes for his 
 own use. Milton's youthful studies were the land- 
 scapes and the treasury of his blindness and want. 
 
 The sister art teaches the same lesson. Claude 
 watched every colour of the skies, the trees, the 
 grass, and the water. The younger Vandervelde 
 transferred the atmospheric changes to large sheets 
 of blue paper, which he took in the boat when he 
 went, as he said, in his Dutch-English, a " skoying" 
 on the Thames. " I have neglected nothing," was 
 the modest explanation which N. Poussin gave of 
 his success. 
 
 With these calls to industry in our ears, we are 
 not to be deaf to the deep saying of Lord Brooke, 
 the friend of Sidney, that some men overbuild their 
 nature with books. The motion of our thoughts 
 is impeded by too heavy a burden ; and the mind, 
 like the body, is strengthened more by the warmth 
 of exercise than of clothes. When Buffon and 
 Hogarth pronounced genius to be nothing but labour 
 and patience, they forgot history and themselves. 
 The instinct must be in the mind, and the fire be 
 ready to fall. Toil alone would not have produced 
 the Paradise Lost^ or the Principia. The born 
 dwarf never grows* to the middle size. Rousseau 
 tells a story of a painter's servant, who resolved to 
 be the rival or the conqueror of his master. He 
 abandoned his livery to live by his pencil. But, in- 
 stead of the Louvre, he stopped at a sign- post. Mere 
 
4 3 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 learning is only a compiler, and manages the pen as 
 the compositor picks out the type — each sets up a 
 book with the hand. Stone-masons collected the 
 dome of St. Paul's, but Wren hung it in air. 
 
 Ease, when it has become constitutional, is called 
 Grace. Until he had got his one tune by heart, 
 Gibbon wrote slowly. The simpler periods of Gold- 
 smith flowed with painful effort. " Everybody," 
 was his own complaint, " wrote better, because he 
 wrote faster than I." Cowper confesses that his 
 pleasant Task was constructed with weariness and 
 watching. Burke's gorgeous imagery had very little 
 of that rush which is commonly heard in it. Addi- 
 son wore out the patience of his printer ; and 
 Dr. Warton assures us, that when a whole impres- 
 sion of a Spectator was nearly worked off, he would 
 frequently stop the press to insert a new preposition. 
 
 The authority of Pope may seem to contradict 
 the argument. He declared that what he wrote the 
 quickest pleased him best, as the Essay on Criticism^ 
 the Rape of the Lock y and a large portion of the Iliad. 
 But the miracle melts as we look at it. Of the first 
 poem the materials were previously digested in prose ; 
 the Sylph-machinery was a supplement to the second ; 
 and the manuscript of the third may be consulted in 
 our National Library. A truer portrait of the poet 
 in his study will be found in his elegant epistle to 
 Jervas, where he reminds his friend of their medita- 
 tive hours, — 
 
 " How oft in pleasing tasks we wear the day, 
 While summer suns roll unperceived away ! 
 How oft our slowly -growing works impart. 
 While images reflect from art to art." 
 
ADVANTAGES OF LITERATURE. 49 
 
 Speed in composition is a questionable advantage. 
 Poetic history records two names which may repre- 
 sent the swift and the thoughtful pen — Lope de Vega 
 and Milton. We see one pouring out verses more 
 rapidly than a secretary could write them ; the other 
 building up, in the watches of the dark, a few 
 majestic lines ; one leaving his treasures to be easily 
 compressed into a single volume ; the other, to be 
 spread abundantly over forty-six quartos; one gain- 
 ing fifteen pounds ; the other, a hundred thousand 
 ducats ; one sitting at the door of his house, when the 
 sun shone, in a coarse coat of gray cloth, and visited 
 only by admiring strangers from foreign countries ; 
 the other followed by crowds whenever he appeared, 
 while even the children shouted after him with 
 delight. 
 
 It is only since the earth has fallen on both, that 
 the fame and the honours of the Spaniard and the 
 Englishman have been changed. He who nearly 
 finished a comedy before breakfast, now lies motion- 
 less in his small niche of monumental biography; 
 and he who, long choosing, began late, is walking 
 up and down in his singing robes, and with the 
 laurel round his head, in the cities of many lands ; 
 having his home and his welcome in every devout 
 heart, and upon every learned tongue of the Christian 
 world. 
 
 Of course, the frequent writer will, in time, be 
 quick. The practised" is the ready hand. Raffaelle, 
 who painted a head with such fine touches that it 
 seems to have been finished by single hairs, could 
 almost work as fast as Rembrandt, who laid on 
 
50 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 his colour with a palette-knife. Dryden's mastery 
 of language and rhyme enabled him to remit to 
 Tonson an instalment of seven thousand five hun- 
 dred verses ; Johnson, from the fulness of his mind, 
 produced Rasselas in the evenings of one week j 
 and Scott wrote the two last volumes of Waverley in 
 twenty-six afternoons of summer. 
 
 Genius easily hews out its figure from the block ; 
 but the sleepless chisel gives it life. We have, in 
 the practice of Titian, an interesting view of the 
 steps by which excellence is won. He began a 
 picture by striking off" an outline in four pencillings \ 
 he then put it aside, sometimes allowing months to 
 go by before he looked at it again ; when he returned 
 to his work, it was with the watchfulness of a rival. 
 The last corrections were given by daily touches. 
 Virgil composed verses in the same manner. He 
 commenced a figure or a landscape in rough sketches. 
 Rare drawings of a painter should we have found in 
 his scattered notes ! What studies did he make of 
 that Carthaginian queen, before she rose from his 
 poetry in the splendour of her charms ! He pro- 
 duced a few lines in the morning, and spent days or 
 months in shaping and adorning them. He was the 
 artist rubbing in tints over the delicate surface of 
 words — 
 
 " And Titian s colour looks like Virgil's art." 
 
 Buffon has told us how patiently he moulded his 
 loose sentences into symmetry. So often did he 
 turn a paragraph in his mind and on his tongue — 
 speaking it over and over until his ear was satisfied 
 
ADVANTAGES OF LITERATURE. 5 1 
 
 — that he was able to repeat whole pages of his 
 works. 
 
 This transparency of diction is only found in pro- 
 ductions of the strongest Genius. A burning in- 
 vention makes it. That exquisite material, through 
 which we gaze on our woods and gardens, obtains 
 its crystalline beauty after undergoing the processes 
 of the furnace. It was melted by fire before the 
 rough particles of sand disappeared, and the fibres ot 
 the leaf, or the streaks of the tulip, were discerned. 
 Similar operations refine language. Imagination 
 mingles the harsh elements of composition until — 
 each coarse, shapeless word being absorbed by the 
 heat — they brighten into that smooth and unclouded 
 style, through which the slightest emotions of the 
 heart, and the faintest colours of fancy, are reflected. 
 
 The theologian, the poet, the historian, or the 
 philosopher, who has this lucidness of utterance, is 
 certain of a wide and lasting reputation. It made 
 Ariosto the Homer of Italy, and gathered all ranks 
 and ages to his knees. Taste and Science, Love 
 and Beauty, hung upon his lips. He was the com- 
 panion of the maiden and the scholar, of a starry 
 Galileo, and a knight in armour. 
 
 Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not 
 keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the 
 window in the landscape it displays. A fine style 
 gives the view of Fancy — its figures, its trees, or its 
 palaces — without a spot. But to a diseased eye, 
 crystal is cold. Hence it happens that the lawful 
 masters of language are sometimes deposed, for a 
 eason, by the daring of literary revolutionists. A 
 
52 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 barbaric uproar drowns the musical voices of Addison 
 and his brethren. One idiom jangles another out 
 of tune. In reading some modern authors, who 
 have nothing of the tripod or the oracle, except the 
 frenzy and the darkness, we are reminded of the 
 pleasant correction which Menage inserted in the 
 Delices d? Esprit of a flighty Frenchman : " Au lieu 
 de Delices, lisez Delires." 
 
 The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. 
 Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dis- 
 located mind whose movements are spasmodic. Pres- 
 sure of thought may overburden sentences with 
 meaning, as in the Analogy of Butler, or in the 
 rhymes of Cowley. Swift confessed to Pope that 
 he had been obliged to read parts of the Essay on 
 Man twice over. It was not obscure, but deep. 
 The Bard of Gray and Collins' s Ode on the poetical 
 character seem dark ; the former from its historical, 
 the latter from its metaphysical, allusions. Nume- 
 rous passages of Milton are incomprehensible to a 
 reader whose knowledge is not large in chivalry, 
 romance, or classical legends. Take the magnificent 
 description of Satan arming his legions, and feeling 
 his heart swell with pride, as he gazes upon the 
 myriads before him : — 
 
 " For never since created man 
 Met such imbodied force, as named with these 
 Could merit more than that small infantry 
 Warr'd on by cranes ; though all the giant brood 
 Of Phlegra with th' heroic race were join'd 
 That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side 
 Mix'd with auxiliar gods ; and what resounds 
 In fable or romance of Uther's son, 
 Begirt with British and Armoric knights ; 
 And all who since, baptized or infidel, 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 53 
 
 Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, 
 Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, 
 Or whom Biserta sent from Africshore, 
 When Charlemain, with all his peerage, fell 
 By Fontarabia." 
 
 In such cases, notes, which are the dictionary or 
 ignorance, will open the chambers of imagery to one 
 who knocks ; and when the sentiment, or the illus- 
 tration, has been disengaged, it delights the eye of 
 taste by its symmetry or grandeur, A foreign writer 
 may fairly claim of his reader a sufficient acquaint- 
 ance with the language. The idioms of Genius will 
 always present obscurities to the uninformed ; they 
 are to be acquired, as a man learns to translate a 
 dialect. When the reader is competent, Genius is 
 bright. We do not expect Waller to appreciate 
 Milton. But, in general, he who understands him- 
 self is easily understood. " The man who is not 
 intelligible, is not intelligent." 
 
 XII. — Criticism enforces Unity of Purpose. 
 
 He runs uncertainly who has two goals. The flight 
 becomes a flutter ; the race, a circle. Raffaelle 
 might lay down his pencil to build a cathedral ; and 
 L. da Vinci fill a page with a problem and a carica- 
 ture. Some gifted adventurer is always sailing round 
 the world of art and science, to bring home costly 
 merchandise from every port. But the warning 
 truth still remains : — 
 
 te One science only will one genius fit: 
 So wide is art, so narrow human wit," 
 
 No fact in ancient history is less disputable than 
 
54 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 its divisions. The Greek stage encouraged no Gar- 
 rick to smile away pathos in farce. The maddened 
 Orestes never disappeared in the mimic of the Clouds. 
 
 The caution is wise : poet and hero are weak on 
 one side. Milton's humour and Hobbes' poetry are 
 among the saddest exhibitions of literature. Bentley's 
 hand forgot its cunning when he laid it on Paradise 
 Lost. Longinus says, that as often as Demosthenes 
 affected to be pleasant in a speech, he made himself 
 ridiculous ; and if he happened to raise a laugh, it 
 was chiefly upon himself. Dante showed an imper- 
 fect acquaintance with the capacities of Art, when he 
 recommended the Revelation of S. John to Giotto, 
 as a subject for the pencil. The enemies of Boileau 
 beheld him shorn in an ode ; Corneille stumbled in 
 comedy ; Sterne was beaten by his valet in learning 
 Italian ; and a regimental schoolmaster might have 
 taken down Marlborough in spelling. Instances of 
 intellectual infirmity are seen admonishing the scholar 
 upon every side. Some muscle, or nerve, of arm or 
 of eye, is always weak. Pope tossed Theobald into 
 the Dunciad^ but he, clinging to the back of Shak- 
 spere, out-ran his tormentor as an editor. The 
 illustration of Temple is forcible as it is homely: — 
 " The abilities of man must fall short on one side or 
 other, like too scanty a blanket when you are a-bed : 
 if you pull it upon your shoulders, you leave your 
 feet bare; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your 
 shoulders are uncovered." 
 
 Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches \ 
 her children to venerate the single eye. Remember 
 Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breath- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 55 
 
 ing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. 
 But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has 
 caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of 
 exquisite beauty are seen and loved ; but the old 
 nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. 
 Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. The sacred 
 pictures of Matsys are the sermons of Sterne. 
 
 Talents to strike the eye of posterity should be 
 concentrated. Rays, powerless while they are scat- 
 tered, burn in a point.. Great men have always 
 one governing series of thoughts. We are not sur- 
 prised to be told that a fly interested Malebranche 
 more than all the Greek and Roman history. 
 Milton's confession about having only the use of his 
 left hand in prose, is a text and a homily in Criticism. 
 
 The thought is pleasing, though visionary, that 
 authors might reap a larger harvest, by Writing books 
 as the brothers Both painted landscapes, or as Ru- 
 bens and Snyders sometimes worked together. Pope 
 was enriched by the gold of Bolingbroke, notwith- 
 standing its alloy. Would not Shakspere and Ben 
 Jonson have played a grander strain in concert ? 
 It is certain that the revision of friends often imparts 
 a new lustre. In this way Lucretius grew brighter 
 under the pen of Cicero ; the Maxims of Rochefou- 
 cault received the exquisite temper of their edge ; 
 the sharpest eyes in Port Royal picked out the over- 
 looked weeds of Pascal, or gathered passages for his 
 Provincial Letters; and the friendly solicitude of 
 Seeker disentangled the intricate argument of Butler. 
 
56 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 XII. — Criticism the Source of 
 Delights. 
 
 Every river flows into branching streams — pleasant 
 to the eye and the ear — that lose themselves among 
 green meadows, or the pebbles of village brooks. 
 Criticism, pursuing its way through the fruitful 
 country of learning, detaches from its current many 
 small tributaries, of which each has its own little 
 patches of corn-land and trees to wander along. All 
 possess interest for the patient explorer ; whether 
 he considers the varying times of the mind's flower 
 and ripeness, the influence of air and climate upon 
 its bloom and growth, the art of repairing injured 
 works, or the obligations of authors to their prede- 
 cessors. 
 
 (1.) Lord Bacon considered that invention in 
 young men is livelier than in old, and that imagina- 
 tions stream into their minds more divinely. He 
 has not defined the boundary of youth. His own 
 thirty-sixth year had come, when he committed to 
 the press those golden meditations which he called 
 Essays. But it is noticeable that his style opened 
 into richer bloom with every added summer of 
 thought. Later editions contain passages of beauty 
 not found in the earlier ; and his Advancement of 
 Learning, published when he was forty-four, beams 
 with the warmest lights of Fancy. His contempo- 
 rary Hobbes was sixty-three before he put forth his 
 evil claim to be remembered in the Leviathan. Sterne 
 was forty-six when Tristram brought London to his 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 57 
 
 door, and furnished him with the boast that he was 
 engaged to dinners fourteen deep. I turn to greater 
 examples. Shakspere concluded his dramatic life 
 afr forty-seven, with the charming story of the 
 Tempest^ of his Plays the most joyous and airy ; 
 it is probable that Milton had reached the same age 
 when he began the Paradise Lost, Why should the 
 broad river become narrower while unnumbered 
 springs continue to flow into it ? Raffaelle died in 
 his thirty-eighth year, with his hand on the " Trans- 
 figuration j" are we to look upon that picture as the 
 mightiest effort of an art that could climb no higher? 
 Was there no fourth manner for the solemn light and 
 stillness of riper manhood, which would have melted 
 warmer colours into his earlier drawing, speaking 
 more fervently to the eye, without weakening his 
 appeal to the affections ? 
 
 It is impossible to make absolute laws for the 
 mind. It has seasons of ripeness and beauty when 
 the colour and the flavour of its fruit are in perfec- 
 tion. But they are irregular ; sometimes they come 
 early. Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in his Humour 
 at twenty-two ; and Paul Potter dropped his pencil 
 before he was twenty-nine. Occasionally the life 
 of the intellect seems to run itself out in one effort. 
 All the fine juice of the vine flows into a single 
 grap$. Zurbaran's early picture divided with Raf- 
 faelle the applause of criticism in the Louvre. Aken- 
 side, at twenty-three, had a lustre of invention which 
 each succeeding year seems to have diminished. It 
 might be that the scholar over-laid the poet ; that 
 the essence of his fancy was drawn off in the Labo- 
 
58 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 ratory ; or that the torrent of youth brought down 
 a few lumps of gold, and his mind had no rich vein 
 imbedded in it, for the full strength of manhood to 
 work. f 
 
 Sometimes the flower unfolds itself in the noon. 
 Francia stood on the threshold of his fortieth year 
 when a picture by Perugino made him a painter. 
 In a few instances, it keeps its choicest odours for 
 the evening, or the night. Dryden was nearly 
 seventy when he completed his charming copies of 
 Chaucer : a cripple, he tells us, in his limbs, but 
 conscious of no decay in the faculties of his soul, 
 excepting that his memory was somewhat weaker, 
 and to compensate for this loss tie found his judg- 
 ment increased. " Thoughts come crowding in so 
 fast upon me that the only difficulty is to choose or 1 
 to reject." 
 
 M. Angelo had nearly reached the years of Dryden 
 when he gave the " Last Judgment" to the world. 
 The splendour of Titian shone most towards its ' 
 setting; his wonderful portrait of Pope Paul the 
 Third was painted at seventy-two, and his magni- 
 ficent " Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" at eighty-one. •' 
 Sixty-four summers only mellowed into ruddier tints l J 
 the nosegay of Rubens ; and Buffon assured a friend 
 that, after passing fifty years over his desk, he was 
 every day learning to write. 
 
 But though the times of fruit-bearing may vary in 
 different minds, we generally find that several fine \ 
 seasons follow each other in succession. Consider 
 the five years of Milton's life, between 1634 and 
 1639, wnen ne wrote Comus, Lycldas, Arcades, and 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 59 
 
 his shorter poems ; take the same period in the his- 
 tory of Shakspere, beginning in 1606 with Macbeth^ 
 and ending, in 1611, with Othello; or cut ofF an 
 equal length from the record of Jeremy Taylor's 
 struggles and toils : see him contributing to his own 
 and every age, between 1647 and 1652, the Liberty 
 of Prophesying, the Great Exemplar, the Holy Living 
 and Dying, and all his nobler sermons. These are 
 precious chapters in the biography of Genius ; we 
 ought not to be surprised if some pages of weaker 
 interest are found before or after them. 
 
 Walking in the fields during the last summer, I 
 saw the sun — then going down in great glory — sud- 
 denly cut in two by a strip of dark cloud, which, 
 nevertheless, showed itself by the colour dimly 
 shining through it to be connected with that magni- 
 ficent luminary ; and while I stood, the vapour 
 melted, and the sun re-appeared in all its large efful- 
 gence. My thoughts turned to the great lights 
 which have been given to rule the intellectual day. 
 I called to remembrance how the broad splendour of 
 Genius, as it rolls along the sky of life from the 
 morning until the evening, has its cold intervals of 
 shadow. The radiance of its manifestation is often 
 broken. An inferior book or picture comes between 
 the rising and the setting glory. A black bar of 
 cloud seems to cut the great light in the middle. It 
 is a noble and comforting recollection that when the 
 gloom passes the mind breaks forth again, and the 
 poet or the philosopher sinks behind the horizon of 
 time, as he rose above it, in a full orb. 
 
 The light of the morning and the evening is 
 
60 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 equally beautifnl, but it differs in tone and hue. So 
 does the Imagination in the young and the old. Yet 
 it may stream divinely into each. The tender green 
 and the nightingale's hymn belong to the spring ; 
 the full rose and the red moon, to the summer and 
 the harvest. The portraitures of dreams upon the 
 eyes under trees, the smiles of love, and the enchant- 
 ments of hope, are the joy and the heritage of 
 youth ; the guardianship of angels, the victories of 
 the soul, and the calm beauty of Paradise, are the 
 illumination and the reward of manhood and age. 
 
 (2.) It has been a subject of ingenious speculation 
 if country, or weather, may be said to cherish or check 
 intellectual growth. Jeremy Collier considered that 
 the understanding needs a kind climate for its health, 
 and that a reader of nice observation might ascertain 
 from the book in what latitude, season, or circum- 
 stances, it had been written. The opponents are 
 powerful. Reynolds ridiculed the notion of thoughts 
 shooting forth with greater vigour at the summer 
 solstice or the equinox j Johnson called it a fantastic 
 foppery. 
 
 The atmospheric theory is as old as Homer. Its 
 laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you 
 go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must 
 scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a • 
 convert. One of the prose hints for his noble frag- 
 ment of a didactic poem runs thus : — u It is the 
 proper work of education and government united to 
 redress the faults that arise from the soil and air.'' 
 Berkeley entertained the same feeling. Writing to 
 Pope from Leghorn, and alluding to some half- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 6l 
 
 formed design he had heard him mention of visiting 
 Italy, he continues : — " What might we not expect 
 from a Muse that sings so well in the bleak climate 
 of England, if she felt the same warm sun, and 
 breathed the same air, with Virgil and Horace ? " 
 
 When Dyer attributes the faults of his Fleece to 
 the Lincolnshire fens, he only awakes a smile. 
 Keats wrote his Ode to a nightingale — a poem full 
 of the sweet south — at the foot of Highgate-hill. 
 But we have the remark of Dryden — probably the 
 result of his own experience — that a cloudy day is 
 able to alter the thoughts of a man ; and, generally, 
 the air we breathe, and the objects we see, have a 
 secret influence upon our imagination. Burke was 
 certain that Milton composed 77 Penseroso in the 
 long-resounding aisle of a mouldering cloister, or 
 ivied abbey. He beheld its solemn gloom in the 
 verse. The fine nerves of the mind are braced, and 
 the strings of the harp are tuned, by different kinds 
 of temperature. " I think," Warburton remarked 
 to Hurd, " you have often heard me say, that my 
 delicious season is the autumn — the season which 
 gives most life and vigour to my intellectual faculties. 
 The light mists, or, as Milton calls them, the steams 
 that rise from the fields in one of these mornings, 
 give the same relief to the views that the blue of the 
 plum gives to the appetite." 
 
 Mozart composed, whenever he had the opportun- 
 ity, in the soft air of fine weather. His Don Gio- 
 vanni and the Requiem were written in a bowling- 
 green and a garden. Chatterton found a full moon 
 favourable to poetic invention, and he often sat up 
 
62 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 all night to enjoy its solemn shining. The spirits 
 of Shelley rose joyously whenever the wind blew from 
 the north-west. Winter-time was most agreeable 
 to Crabbe. He delighted in a heavy fall of snow, 
 and it was during a severe storm which blocked him 
 within doors, that he portrayed the strange miseries 
 of Sir Eustace Grey. 
 
 (3.) The art of emendation demands the union ot 
 many talents. Porson adjusting the text of Euri- 
 pides, is the architect restoring a palace. The pur- 
 suit of Genius into its treasure-house is an inferior, 
 but a more interesting accomplishment. It is one 
 which all readers may share, and which deserves to 
 be called a pleasure, if not an object and advantage, 
 of literature. The need of it is the greater, as me- 
 mories are often weak. Addison copied into the 
 Spectator^ from an Italian ethical work of the six- 
 teenth century, a story about a mirror and a lady, 
 but omitted to state its foreign descent. The occu- 
 pation is to be enjoyed with caution. A coincidence 
 is not a robbery. The most agreeable of all satirists 
 has playfully exhibited a clever curiosity gone astray, 
 in the portrait of a scholar who reads all books : — 
 
 " And all he reads assails, 
 From DryderTs Fables down to Durfey's tales ; 
 With him most authors steal their works — not buy : 
 Garth did not write his own Dispensary." 
 
 Swift seems to indicate the fair distinction between 
 the theft of the scribbler and the loan of the author, 
 by saying that the lighting a candle at a neighbour's 
 fire does not affect our property in the wick and 
 flame. Milton held a torch to Ovid, and Taylor to 
 Chrysostom. But both carried materials for burn- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 63 
 
 ing. The ignible substance belonged to them- 
 selves. 
 
 Some imitation is involuntary and unconscious. 
 No mighty intellect can be lost. Time only covers 
 to reproduce it : there is nothing in the poet, or the 
 philosopher, 
 
 " But doth suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 
 
 Plato dies in the school to appear in the pulpit. 
 Genius is nourished from within and without. Its 
 food is self-grown and gathered. Like a rich-bearing 
 tree, it absorbs the juices of the soil and the balm 
 of the air, but draws from its own blood the life that 
 swells out the trunk, and gives colour and flavour 
 to the fruit. 
 
 XIV. — The Lessons of Criticism. 
 
 (1.) An artist once objected to a famous painter, 
 that he could never tell where, in nature, he found 
 those gorgeous hues, which seem to inflame his 
 landscape, and shower purple and crimson over the 
 field and the river. The ear of Society caught up the 
 reply, — M I dare say that you never see such colours ; 
 but do you not wish that you could ? " 
 
 One of the lessons of Criticism is the folly of" 
 making our own knowledge a standard of probability. 
 Consider the bone of a reptile in the hand of a 
 ploughman, and of Owen. The common observer 
 notices only one hue of green, while the cultivated 
 eye perceives a gray tint in the sun's reflection on 
 leaves and grass. An Abyssinian traveller saw in 
 
64 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 the Bay of Tajoura the azure and gold of the most 
 extravagant picture ; and Mrs. Houstoun speaks of 
 the autumn foliage in American woods as bewilder- 
 ing the describer by its dazzling varieties. " If a 
 painter were to endeavour to depict them to life, he 
 would be called as mad a's Turner." A testimony 
 yet more extraordinary is heard in Colonel Mitchell's 
 exploring expedition into the interior of Tropical 
 Australia. One day his path conducted him into a 
 valley so sublimely grotesque that he called it u Sal- 
 vator Rosa." A river was surrounded by hills, of 
 which some took the shape of cathedrals in ruins, 
 and others of decayed fortifications. The comparison 
 that the scene suggested to the visitor was a sepia 
 landscape of Martin. 
 
 Poetical images — which are the lights and land- 
 scapes of fancy — claim the benefit of these illustra- 
 tions. There are deep recesses of feeling in the 
 heart of Genius, which seem not less marvellous to 
 the common reader, than the Australian vale was to 
 the traveller. What is unknown is not impossible. 
 Disbelief of things because they are contrary to our 
 experience is fatal to entertainment and truth, both 
 in literature and in morals. 
 
 A trifling circumstance occurs to me in Thom- 
 son's account of the Dorsetshire Downs, where he 
 speaks of their woody slopes dipping into shadow, 
 the broad patches of corn-land, and enormous flocks 
 scattered over uninhabited tracts of country — these 
 he calls " white. But the epithet was an accom- | 
 modation of truth to poetical custom ; when he 
 composed the Seasons, the sheep of Dorset were ,j 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 65 
 
 usually washed with red ochre. Suppose that he 
 had preserved this local peculiarity, and writ- 
 ten : — 
 
 " Pure Dorsetian downs 
 The boundless prospect spread, here shagged with woods, 
 There rich with harvests, and there red with sheep ; " 
 
 the whole array of town critics would have been in 
 arms, impatient for the assault, yet certain of defeat. 
 The amplest knowledge has the largest faith. Igno- 
 rance is always incredulous. Tell an English cot- 
 tager that the belfries of Swedish churches are crim- 
 son, and his own white steeple furnishes him with a 
 contradiction. 
 
 (2.) Criticism checks admiration in its excess. 
 Literature has its superstitions and its intolerance. 
 An acute scholar remarked that there is not an 
 anomaly of grammar, or metre, in Milton, which has 
 not been praised as a beauty. Raffaelleis injured by 
 the same idolatry. Look at the miraculous " Draught 
 of Fishes." What a boat! Richardson saw in it 
 only the choice of a lesser evil, and wonderful skill 
 in overcoming it ; but Opie has proved that the re- 
 sources of art might easily have subdued the dif- 
 ficulty without offence to the judgment. What is 
 true of RafFaelle's commentators in one instance, is 
 true of Shakspere's continually ; in the eyes of his 
 worshippers the idol is faultless. An ingenious 
 writer compared his poetry to St. Peter's at Rome, 
 and recommended the reader of the drama — like the 
 visitor in the church — when displeased by a spot to 
 take a step further and gaze upon a beauty. The 
 advice is good, if the blemish be not vaunted as a 
 
 F 
 
66 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 charm. There ought to be some strong shades be- 
 tween the devotee and the heretic. 
 
 We have authors in morocco who would not be 
 recognized by their contemporaries — they are so 
 bedizened with dress, and spangled with flattery. 
 Much of this exaggerated praise may be resolved into 
 self-love. The critic, like the traveller, scrawls his 
 name upon a Pyramid. Jones lives with Cheops ; 
 Drake with Shakspere. 
 
 It was an observation of Pope, that poets, who 
 are always afraid of envy, have quite as much reason 
 to be alarmed at admiration. He looked upon Shaks- 
 pere as writing to the people without views of re- 
 putation, and having, at his first appearance, no other 
 aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence j 
 or, as he puts the opinion in his poignant verse — 
 
 "Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill 
 Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) 
 For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, 
 And grew immortal in his own despite." 
 
 Shakspere himself confirms Pope's estimate of 
 his character. He made his fortune, and forgot his 
 plays. Having created a home and a treasure, he 
 threw away the wand. It had done its work in 
 sending him to Stratford. We shall find a profitable 
 moral in Goldsmith's amusing complaint that he was 
 regarded as a partizan, when his only object was to ! 
 write a book that would sell. 
 
 A deep reverence for the Poet may be combined 
 with the liveliest sense of his weakness and false 
 taste. His magnificent images, his loving wisdom, 
 and his noble sentiments, were the beamings of that 
 sun-like mind which shone over the whole world of' 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 67 
 
 nature and fancy ; they were inseparably his own. 
 
 i His mock-fights, his artificial thunder, his quibbles 
 and grossness, were chiefly outward accidents of 
 
 ; situation and circumstances. They were so many 
 fragments from his festival of imagination and humour, 
 
 J scornfully flung to stay the hunger of the Pit. 
 
 Why should Shakspere escape the common lot ? 
 Works of Genius must be imperfect. Irregularity 
 
 ] is a law of their existence and splendour. Brilliancy, 
 twilight, and shadow, are so many inequalities of 
 
 i surface along a body essentially luminous. Criticism, 
 which does not observe the gloom, is like an im- 
 perfect telescope that discovers no spots in the sun. 
 The true observer admits the polemical flatness of 
 Paradise Lost^ and the overloading sombreness of 
 Rembrandt's " Night-Watch/' The low comedy 
 of Damaetas and Mopsa displeases his ear in the 
 Arcadia of Sidney, and he wishes to shade away the 
 deep lamp-black in the " Transfiguration" of Raf- 
 faelle. His love of Spenser does not reconcile his 
 eye to a woodman in Lincoln green during the en- 
 chanted reign of Arthur; and he thinks that S. 
 Rosa might have selected a fitter ornament than a 
 cannon for the tent of Holofernes. 
 
 Criticism has more dignified duties and nobler 
 pleasures than these. It is the protector of the un- 
 friended, and the avenger of the smitten. Newton 
 found that a star, examined through a glass tarnished 
 by smoke, was diminished into a speck of light. 
 But no smoke ever breathed so thick a mist as envy 
 or detraction. If Milton had come to us in the 
 ent of Waller, his original brightness would 
 
 : ! judgmc 
 
68 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 have sunk into a glimmer. Inferior talents sufFei 
 in their degree. South ey spoke of Flecknoe as 
 far from being the despicable scribbler, whom 
 Dryden pelted with such contumely ; and Johnson 
 desired to see the collected works of that Dennis, 
 who is beheld by most people bespattered and raving 
 in the pillory of Pone. 
 
 We may learn from the poet what perils are en- 
 countered by merit. He published his Essay on 
 Man without his name. Mallet, a noisy contractor of 
 literary all-work, called at Twickenham soon after its 
 appearance. Pope, who delighted to do everything by' 
 stratagem, inquired the news of books. His visitor 
 informed him that the latest publication was some- 
 thing about Man : that he had glanced at it, but detect- 
 ing the incompetency of the writer, soon tossed m 
 aside. Pope with exquisite cruelty told him the secret.. 
 
 Pope might sit in his grotto, and amuse himself 
 with inventing new tortures for the purgatory of( 
 Dunces : his fame and his fortune were sure. But 
 suppose the author of the Essay to have been m 
 genius struggling up the hill — a Chatterton with m 
 Walpole for a patron, — that pert falsehood of Mallet 
 might have overset all his hopes. How often has 
 such a catastrophe befallen the worthiest adventurer I 
 Putting to sea with his first freight, the enemy — ini, 
 the strong image of Jeremy Collier — has fired the ( 
 beacons, drawn down the posse at his landing, and 
 charged him while he was staggering on the beach. L 
 
 In such cases Criticism appears like some god-^ 
 dess in Homeric warfare — awful, yet sweet. Insulted 
 intellect is crowned after its death ; and the eloquent. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 69 
 
 panegyric is a chamber where the author lies in state. 
 The scorn and the anguish of a life are recompensed 
 by the magnificence of the mourning ; while a beau- 
 tiful colour seems to bathe the sleeper from the 
 overhanging canopy. These funeral rites should be 
 reserved for the princes of learning. Criticism 
 bribed by the affections, by passion, or by interest, 
 sometimes arrays the usurper in the trappings or 
 royalty. Flattery sits at the head with its crown 
 and sceptre 3 the bier is emblazoned with escutcheons. 
 But rank in literature is neither inherited nor be- 
 stowed. If the soul of Genius did not animate the 
 author, his collapsed reputation is only lifted up like 
 the body of Arvalan in Eastern story. The motion 
 comes from the tread of the bearers, as the powerless, 
 bloodless frame sways to and fro with its own 
 ungoverned and corrupting weight. 
 
 This Discourse scarcely presumes to speak of 
 Criticism, as it now lives and flourishes. Much, 
 however, of the pleasure of literature arises out or 
 its skilful exercise. If there be in it little of the 
 splenetic heart of a former century, there is abun- 
 dance of untimely fruit, and confident foreheads. 
 Its defects are twofold, — a want of modesty, and a 
 want of knowledge. A remedy for the former is to 
 be found in the removal of the latter. A silent no- 
 viciate of five years would sow the mind. The 
 truest critic, like the deepest philosopher, will pro- 
 duce his opinions as doubts. Only the astrologer 
 and the empyric never fail. 
 
 A thoughtful person is struck by the despotic 
 teaching of the modern school. The decisions of 
 
JO PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 the eighteenth century are reversed, and the au- 
 thority of the judges is ignored. Addison's chair is 
 filled by Hazlitt ; a German mist intercepts Hurd. 
 Our classical writers daily recede further from the 
 public eye. Milton is visited like a monument. 
 The scholarly hand alone brushes the dust from 
 Dryden. The result is unhappy. Critics and 
 readers, by a sort of necessity, refer every production 
 of the mind to a modern standard. The age weighs 
 itself. One dwarf is measured by another. The 
 fanciful lyrist looks tall when Pindar is put out of 
 sight. This is like boarding up Westminster Abbey, 
 and all the cathedrals, and deciding on the merits of 
 a church, by comparing it with the newest Gothic 
 design that, sent too soon to the roadside, implores 
 of every passer-by the charity of a steeple. 
 
 XV. — Poetry, its Shapes and Beauties. 
 
 
 Poetry is the first Pleasure of Literature that cap- 
 tivates the eye and the heart. It is the pearl shining 
 in the bosom of the story. Whatever of beautiful, 
 instructive, or alluring, belongs to Philosophy, His- 
 tory, or Fiction, is wrapped up in Poetry. It sets 
 the hardest lessons to music. Epicurus might have 
 rejoiced to send his pupils to Lucretius, and the 
 Roman farmer have found his text-book in the 
 Georgics. Such charms have endeared Poetry. 
 
 The Temple of Fame contains no sepulchres so 
 beautified by love as those of the poets. Their 
 memory is bound up with the histories of kings and 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 7 1 
 
 nobles. Davenant records, in musical prose, some 
 of the rare achievements of minstrelsy. A tyrant 
 lived with the praise and died with the blessing of 
 Greece, for gathering the dust of Homer into an 
 urn ; Thebes was preserved by the harp of Pindar j 
 the elder Scipio lay in the bosom of Ennius ; Lae- 
 lius was flattered by the rumour of his helping 
 Terence ; Virgil brightened the purple of an Em- 
 peror ; and the Capitol shouted for Petrarch. 
 
 Poetry deserves the honour it obtains as the eldest 
 offspring of Literature, and the fairest. It is the 
 fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower, 
 and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty 
 and colour, which differ with the soil that receives 
 and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it 
 comes up the rose of Haflz ; in England, the many- 
 blossomed tree of Shakspere. 
 
 Poetry is the making of thought. He who finds, 
 creates. The Poet calls shadows into the crystal of 
 memory, as the Charmer, in old times, peopled his 
 glass with faces of the absent. Mirrors of magic 
 may represent the inventions of the minstrel. The 
 Phantasy of the Greeks, the Vision of the Latins, 
 and the Imagination of ourselves, signify the same 
 work of the mind, the causing to appear. 
 
 Imagination is the union of likenesses, and their 
 exhibition in new forms. It is composed of several 
 conceptions folded into each other. For example 
 — The memory entertains an idea of a palace ; 
 Imagination embellishes it with splendid apartments, 
 crowns it with gilded pinnacles, or embosoms it in 
 gardens. The strange animal of the traveller bristles 
 
72 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 into the Dragon of Spenser. The Helen of Zeuxis 
 was the blended harmony and bloom of a five-fold 
 loveliness ; and the Hercules of Glycon showed the 
 ennobled symmetry of his most athletic contempo- 
 raries. Raffaelle and Guido professed to have their 
 model enshrined in one certain Idea of beauty j yet 
 it was not created in the mind. The features of 
 life, in its purest developments, were spiritualized by 
 Imagination. A common face is thrown upon the 
 glass, and the sun brightens it. The smallest seed 
 may contain the flower. The Greek sculptor never 
 saw Jupiter, but he had gazed upon heroes. Milton 
 walked in a garden before he planted Eden. 
 
 In this way the most exquisite combinations of the 
 Poet are traced back to their beginnings ; whether 
 Milton dazzles us with the flash of unnumbered 
 swords in his dark Consistory ; or Virgil brings 
 Minerva shouting to the Greeks in the flames of 
 Troy ; or Tasso illuminates the hill-top with the 
 feet of an angel ; or Shelley compares life to a dome 
 of glass which 
 
 ** Stains the white radiance of Eternity ;" 
 
 in each case the writer had something to work 
 upon. The outline lay in his recollection. The 
 visible led him to the unseen. The conception 
 opened into the image. 
 
 If we divide Poetry into Classic and Romantic, 
 the former will be found to delight most the taste 
 and the heart ; the latter, the imagination and the 
 senses. A flowing outline of calm dignity marks 
 the Parthenon and Samson Agonistes. Broken shadows, 
 mystery, and awe, endear an old Gothic house and a 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE* 73 
 
 canto of Spenser. The enchanted forest of Tasso 
 casts a dread fuller shade over the thoughts than the 
 grove of Lucan. Warton supposes a reader to be 
 more impressed by the black plumes on the helmet 
 in Otranto^ and the gigantic arm on the great stair- 
 case, than by any paintings of Ovid or Apuleius. 
 
 By whatever name the beautiful in thought may 
 be distinguished — Classic or Gothic, Descriptive or 
 Philosophical — the lover of fancy welcomes it. He 
 drinks at every fountain of taste. In each colour 
 and bend of the wide landscape he discovers some- 
 thing to admire : the cloud- capt battlements and 
 flashing standards of the Epic ; the dim mountain 
 heights of the Contemplative ; the sunny slope of the 
 Pastoral ; or the heaving turf of the Elegist. What- 
 ever is lovely and of good report is within the reach 
 of his sympathy. He turns from the humour 
 of Chaucer to the dreams of Collins j as he feels 
 opposite emotions roused and gratified by the Wood- 
 man of Gainsborough, and the Saint of Francia. 
 
 In a true Epic, he admires the palace of the Muse. 
 Each book is a state-room full of portraits of princes 
 and heroes. Long lines of historic ancestors and 
 splendid achievements rise to his memory. He reads 
 Homer with some of the sentiment with which he 
 visits Windsor. Reflective poetry exerts its power 
 in a different manner. The palace moulders into 
 the cathedral ; tombs replace the ancestral pictures ; 
 the cloister is the royal chamber ; and Death 
 breathes the kingly consecration of Time. 
 
 Gayer scenes sometimes invite him. Sir Hudibras 
 talks Babylonian 3 Gilpin's postchaise takes him up for 
 
74 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Edmonton ; Pope introduces a Conversation-piece, 
 sparkling as Watteau's ; Thomson leads him among 
 the ripe fruit, and under the warm shade of the 
 garden wall ; or if his mood be idler, he gathers 
 a few sonnets, the hedge-flowers of fancy, and 
 dreams over a stanza of Parnell and Shenstone. 
 
 The advantages of Poetry are many, as its de- 
 lights are common. It makes dark weather fair, 
 and blue skies bluer. The dismallest day — a giant 
 of clouds — sinks before it. Not only Shakspere 
 and Milton bear the sling ; the fatal pebble may 
 be taken from a village brook. The insolent 
 Philistine, who lords it over a noble spirit, is 
 frequently vanquished and plundered by one of a 
 ruddy countenance, coming from the country and 
 the sheepfold. 
 
 It is worth observing how much our out-of-door 
 pleasures are heightened by the poets. Nature, 
 
 " By all her blooms and mingled murmurs dear," 
 
 is brought closer to the heart ; her charms are 
 doubled. The fields look greener ; brighter people 
 walk among the corn. Wordsworth gilds the forest 
 arches with the equipage of Olympus ; Spenser 
 touches the mossy roots of old beeches into sunshine 
 with the angel face of Una ; Shakspere sprinkles 
 moonbeams to 
 
 " Tip with silver all the fruit-tree tops j " 
 
 Southey 
 
 " Mottles with mazy shade the orchard slope ; " 
 
 and Bloomfield gathers the white clouds to rest in the 
 evening sky, like a flock of sheep with the shepherd. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 75 
 
 Poetry in general resembles a field-path which the 
 whole village may walk upon. Most of its beauties 
 are unenclosed. But here and there a choice tree, 
 or a fine glimpse of scenery, is shut in. Only a 
 learned taste may open the gate and show the grounds. 
 Akenside, Collins, Gray, and T. Warton, are ex- 
 amples of this kind. The principle of their style is 
 twofold; embracing — i. The construction of a 
 language differing from that of society ; and 2. The 
 decoration and arrangement of it, according to the 
 laws of design and colour. The first object is 
 sought by blending foreign idioms with those of 
 home ; and the second by disposing the thoughts to 
 captivate and dazzle the eye. 
 
 It is obvious that the gratification which such 
 productions afford lies beyond the sentiment, or the 
 description, and is independent of either. A Greek 
 or a Latin phrase, suddenly encountered, is like a 
 sketch of a ruin or a costume in a traveller's note- 
 book. It carries the mind back into the scenery and 
 the customs of ancient people. " By these means, " it 
 has been elegantly observed, " the genius of the poet, 
 instead of leading, seems only to accompany us into 
 the regions of his beautiful creations, while the 
 activity of the fancy multiplies into a thousand forms 
 the image it has received ; and the memory, gather- 
 ing up the most distant associations, surrounds the 
 poet with a lustre not his own." 
 
 These are the enclosed beauties of Poetry — shel- 
 tered garden-beds of curious flowers — not to be 
 judged by comparison with the open landscape, but 
 to be visited and enjoyed for their own particular 
 
76 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 charms. There can be no uniformity of excellence. 
 Each style of invention — poetic, architectural, artis- 
 tic, or musical — has its own laws, and demands a 
 trial which shall be based upon them. Marino and 
 Cowley would not call Petrarch and Wordsworth as 
 witnesses to character. Ariosto demurs to a sum- 
 ming up of Quintilian. Julio Romano represents 
 the Hours feeding the Horses of the Sun ; Landseer j 
 takes his palfrey from the meadow to prance with 
 cavalier or lady, in the green array of the olden time. 
 What then ? Have we one measure for the most 
 poetical and the truest of Painters ? Must the alle- 
 goric and the real be thrown into the same scale ? 
 
 Look at the argument in another way. Hang 
 Wilkie's tc Rent-Day" and a picture of P. Veronese 
 together. We are contrasting an interior in Gold- 
 smith's Auburn with Milton's grandest compositions 
 from Mythology. In one, the elements of interest 
 are few and simple — the old furniture, the weeping 
 woman, the hard broker ; nothing speaks to the 
 imagination, or the taste : the appeal is to the heart. 
 In the other, the materials of impression are many i 
 and costly — sculptured columns, sumptuous trains of ! 
 servants, the plume and stateliness of war. The : 
 heart is untouched ; all strikes the eye, and is 
 addressed to it. Bring the beggar from the street, \ 
 and he has a pulse and a tear for Wilkie j but call 
 the scholar from his prints and statues, to appreciate 
 the grace and the dignity of Verona. The accom- 
 plished reader tries to unite the feelings of sympathy 
 and of taste. He acknowledges each to be a master, 
 and admires both if he can. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. JJ 
 
 Hitherto we have been considering those delights 
 which Poetry supplies to the mind. But it has 
 other attractions. Next to its language is the tone 
 of its voice. It makes love to the ear, and wins it 
 with music. Certain passages possess a beauty 
 altogether unconnected with their meaning. The 
 reader is conscious of a strange, dreamy sense of 
 enjoyment, as of lying upon warm grass in a June 
 evening, while a brook tinkles over stones in the 
 glimmer of trees. Sidney records the effect of the 
 old ballad on himself; and Spence informs us that 
 he never repeated particular lines of delicate modu- 
 lation without a shiver in his blood, not to be 
 expressed. Boyle was conscious of a tremor at the 
 utterance of two verses in Lucan ; and Derham 
 knew " one to have a chill about his head," upon 
 reading or hearing the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, 
 and David's lamentation for Jonathan. How deep 
 is the magic of sound may be learned by breaking 
 some sweet verses into prose. The operation has 
 been compared to gathering dew-drops, which shine 
 like jewels upon the flower, but run into water in 
 the hand. The elements remain, but the sparkle is 
 gone. 
 
 Of all the measures in which Imagination takes 
 its pastime, the heroic line of Milton and Shakspere 
 is the most rich and changeful. It is full of oppor- 
 tunities. Every colour and shade play on its broken 
 surface. No gleam of sun is lost. Its broad mirror 
 gives space for the magnificence of imagery, and the 
 long-drawn pomp of description ; for the snowy 
 piles of alabaster, where the chief of the angelic 
 
78 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 guard kept watch near the Eastern gate of Eden, 
 his shield and sword " hung high with diamond 
 flaming;" and for the bark of the Egyptian, with its 
 silken sails and painted fans, gliding on its own 
 shadow of gold along the glassy Cydnus. 
 
 Milton played on his metre like his organ. He 
 brings out with a daring finger every grand and 
 various note, sometimes — with wonderful effect — 
 striking a momentary crash of discord into the full 
 swell of the music. He disregards syllables. A 
 poet, not unworthy to criticise him, quotes the 
 verses in which Death threatens Satan at the gates 
 of Hell— 
 
 " Back to thy punishment, 
 False fugitive ! and to thy speed add wings, 
 Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue 
 Thy ling'ring — or with one stroke of this dart 
 Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before;" 
 
 and remarks, " The hand of a master is felt through 
 every movement of this sentence, especially towards 
 the close, where it seems to grapple with the throat 
 of the reader ; the hard, staccato stops, that well nigh 
 take the breath, in attempting to pronounce c or, 
 with one stroke of this dart,' are followed by an 
 explosion of sound in the last line like a heavy dis- L 
 charge of artillery." 
 
 Shenstone found his ear always pleased by the in- 
 troduction of words — like watery — which, consisting ,. 
 of two syllables, have the fulness of three. The 
 employment of spondees, with the melody of dac- r 
 tyls, is another secret of Milton's versification. If i 
 Shakspere be studied with equal attention, the ' 
 whole power and compass of the English language 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 79 
 
 will be understood. Perhaps it is susceptible or no 
 ! inflection of harmony, not even the low thrill of the 
 flageolet, which is not brought out in the passionate 
 I or familiar tones of its imperial Master. 
 
 The rhyming couplet may claim the second 
 I rank. Dryden took the tinkle from the chime, 
 I by his artful and various pauses. At once ma- 
 I jestic and easy, with the warble of the flute and 
 j the trumpet-peal, he fills and entrances the ear. 
 I The mellifluence of Pope, as Johnson called it, has 
 ! the defect of monotony. Exquisite in the sweet 
 I rising and falling of its clauses, it seldom or never 
 takes the ear prisoner by a musical surprise. If 
 Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he displays 
 none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the 
 songster. He has no variations. The tune is deli- 
 cate, but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all 
 over brilliant, which pipes its one lay in a golden 
 cage, and has forgotten the green wood in the luxury 
 of confinement. But Dryden's versification has the 
 freedom and the freshness of the fields. Running: 
 through his noblest harmonies, we catch, at inter- 
 vals, that rude sweetness of a Scottish air which he 
 himself heard in Chaucer. This is a great charm. 
 He preserved the simple, unpremeditated graces of 
 the earlier couplet, its confluence and monosyllabic 
 close, while he added a dignity and a splendour un- 
 known before. Pope's modulation is of the ear ; 
 Dryden's of the subject. He has a different tone for 
 Iphigenia slumbering under trees, by the fountain 
 side ; for the startled knight, who listens to strange 
 sounds within the glooms of the wood ; and for 
 
80 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 the courtly Beauty to whom he wafted a com- 
 pliment. 
 
 The stanza, to which Spenser has given a 
 name, combines the advantages of the blank verse 
 with the graces of the rhymed. Dryden confessed 
 his obligations to a concord of sounds for helping 
 him to a thought, and some of the most elaborate 
 delineations of Spenser appear to have grown out of 
 the necessities of his metre. Warton instances the 
 binding of Furor by Guyon : — 
 
 " With hundred iron chains he did him bind, 
 
 And hundred knots, which did him sore constrain j 
 
 Yet his great iron teeth he still did grind, 
 
 And grimly gnash, threatening revenge in vain : 
 
 His burning eyes, ivhom bloody streaks did stain, 
 
 Stared full <wide } and threw forth sparks of fire ; 
 
 And more for rank despight, than for great pain, 
 
 Sbakt bis long locks coloured like copper wire, 
 
 And bit his tawny beard to show his raging ire." 
 
 But for the tyranny of rhyme, we might have 
 wanted the vivid circumstances of the fifth, sixth, 
 and eighth lines. The stanza, in Spenser's hand, is 
 equal to any Rembrandt-effect of shadow, or fear. 
 Never did the armour of a knight strike more glit- 
 tering rays into the dark, or a red thunderbolt tear 
 up the ground with a fiercer plunge, than in his 
 verse. But its nature is gentler and more sunny. 
 Its home is on the lips of love, when May throws 
 flowers from her lap, or with the dreaming En- 
 chantress, whose warm tresses are sprinkled by 
 ambrosia j 
 
 u on either hand upswells 
 The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest." 
 
 Then all the hidden melody of its soul comes forth. 
 Listen to the description of the abode of Sleep : — 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. &I 
 
 " And more to lull him in his slumbers soft, 
 
 A trickling stream from high rocks tumbling downe, 
 And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft, 
 Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the sowne 
 Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne : 
 No other noise, nor people's troublous cries 
 As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne, 
 Might there be heard ; but careless Quiet lies, 
 Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies." 
 
 A writer, who has thrown many pleasant lights 
 upon poetry, reminds us that in reading this stanza 
 we ought to humour it with a corresponding tone of 
 voice, lowering or deepening it, " as though we were 
 going to bed ourselves, or thinking of the rainy 
 night that had lulled us." He suggests that atten- 
 tion to the accent and pause in the last line will 
 make us feel the depth and distance of the scene. 
 This sense of remote loneliness forms a delightful 
 peculiarity of Spenser at all seasons. A thousand 
 miles of dark trees seem to rustle between the world 
 and the poet. Mr. Coleridge points out the ima- 
 ginative absence of space and time in the Faery 
 ^ueen. The haunted region has no boundary — the 
 reader goes with the poet, as the Waking Beauty 
 followed the conquering Prince : — 
 
 " Across the hills and far away 
 
 Beyond their utmost purple rim, 
 And deep into the dying day." 
 
 His eyes are in a trance, delicious as that which 
 held the maid, the page, and the peacock, when a 
 sudden breeze swept through the garden, and all the 
 clocks of that marvellous house struck together. 
 He is in Dreamland, without the wish or the power 
 to ask, or to learn, how he came, or when he is to 
 depart. If a faint murmur from the dim world of 
 
 G 
 
82 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 life break on the calm, some sweet symphony of 
 the silver-sounding instruments soon renews the 
 spell — 
 
 " A most melodious sound 
 Of all that might delight a dainty ear, 
 Such as, at once, might not on living ground, 
 Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere." 
 
 The picturesque of versification shares the incon- 
 veniences of the picturesque in building ; dark 
 windows and winding galleries perplex the footstep ; 
 obscure similes and intricate epithets entangle the 
 attention. The defects of the Spenserian stanza 
 are classed under three heads : (i.) Dilation of cir- 
 cumstances, however insignificant; (2.) Repetition 
 of words; (3.) The introduction of puerile or un- 
 becoming thoughts to complete the rhyme. For the 
 most part the skill of the poet overcomes the dif- 
 ficulties. His nimble hand ranges over the keys 
 and brings the harshest notes into concord. Oc- 
 casionally, however, lines are rebellious. A stanza 
 turns upon him, but he encounters it with a resolu- 
 tion which reminded an ingenious critic, of Hercules 
 breaking the back of the Nemean lion. He dislo- 
 cates the tender nerves of a metaphor with a merci- 
 less grasp ; alters, lengthens, or cuts away words 
 and letters. Language is his kingdom, and he rules 
 it like a despot. 
 
 After every abatement, the stanza itself remains 
 unequalled for breadth, richness, and sound. It is 
 marked, moreover, by a romantic wildness, which 
 is singularly appropriate to the visionary temper of 
 the poem. The lingering, dying fall of the closing 
 Alexandrine suits well the antique style, and the 
 
83 
 
 serious light of the verse. As the music rolls down 
 the shadowy canto, which the cloud of allegory and 
 the beams of fancy fill with a balmy twilight, we 
 recall to our memory the anthem in a gorgeous 
 chapel, when it sweeps along the branching roof, 
 and trembles round the decorated pinnacles, and 
 sighs among the glimmering stone-work and the 
 fading canopies, until every pillar and leaf are 
 
 " Kissed 
 By sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife." 
 
 It would be like reckoning up the notes of the 
 wood in spring, to dwell upon the pleasures afforded 
 to the ear by that linked sweetness, which gives the 
 title of "lyrical" to the dancing numbers of Cowley, 
 and the buoyant Masques of Milton and Jonson ; 
 while the laboured efforts of their genius are honoured 
 and surveyed, the gayer language of fancy is ever on 
 the tongue. Paradise Lost is laid up in cedar ; but 
 & Allegro is a household word. 
 
 It was a saying of Shenstone, and experience con- 
 firms it, that the lines of poetry, the periods of prose, 
 and even the texts of Scripture most frequently re- 
 collected and quoted, are those which are felt to be 
 pre-eminently musical. The simplest rhythm is 
 the softest, and the most familiar is the dearest. 
 New forms disturb the ear by disappointing it. Per- 
 haps the innovations of Horace may help to explain 
 the neglect of him which the discoveries of Pompeii 
 suggest. Collins has not rendered the unrhymed 
 ode popular. Southey pays in reputation for the 
 difficulty of his tunes. Whatever changes be rung 
 upon bells, they ought to be chimes. The com- 
 
84 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 positions, to which we return with aftectionate 
 frequency, owe their interest to the cadence scarcely 
 less than to their imagery. Take the following 
 specimen, which has the warble and the pathos or 
 the nightingale : — 
 
 Youth and Age. 
 
 u Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like ; 
 Friendship is a sheltering tree ; 
 Oh, the joys that came down shower-like, 
 Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, 
 Ere I was old ! 
 Ere I was old ! Ah, woeful Ere ! 
 Which tells me, Youth's no longer here ! 
 
 Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 
 Tis known that thou and I were onej 
 
 I'll think it but a fond conceit- 
 It cannot be that Thou art gone ! 
 The vesper bell hath not yet tolled, 
 And thou wert aye a masker bold ! 
 What strange disguise hast now put on, 
 To make believe that thou art gone ? 
 
 1 see these locks in silvery slips, 
 
 This drooping gait, this altered size : 
 But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, 
 
 And tears take sunshine from thine eyes. 
 Life is but thought ; so think I will, 
 That Youth and I are house-mates still." 
 
 XVI. — Satire excluded from Poetry. 
 
 The Satirist is only related to the Poet when he j 
 beautifies the exhibition of real life with the lights of I 
 fancy, and ennobles invective into allegory ; when 
 he puts the crown upon some martyr of Learning, 
 or immortalizes a moral malefactor in fire. But as 
 the mere outburst of passion, disappointment, or 
 rivalry, Satire is banished from the family of Song. 
 Literature loves the good-will and peace she teaches. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 85 
 
 Quarrels in verse or in prose, never gain her pro- 
 tection. The abuse of Churchill melts with the 
 winter snow. Even the mightiest word-combatants 
 draw few eyes to the story of their struggles ; and the 
 fierce controversy of Milton has left no deeper traces 
 behind it, than the feet of a Greek wrestler upon the 
 dust of the arena. 
 
 Viewed in its happiest form, as a work of art, 
 Satire has one defect which seems to be incurable — 
 its uniformity of censure. Bitterness scarcely admits 
 those fine transitions, which make the harmony of a 
 composition. Aquafortis bites a plate all over alike. 
 The satirist is met by the difficulty of the etcher. 
 But he wants his opportunities of conquering it. 
 The graver may lend emphasis to the needle. The 
 angry pen has no ally. The necessary balance of 
 effect can only be given by a different hand. A 
 satire should be interpolated by a philosopher, and the 
 gnomic wisdom of Jackson be stamped upon Pope. 
 
 XVII. — The Drama, its Character and 
 Entertainment. 
 
 Dryden. defined a play to be a just and lively image 
 of human nature, representing its passions and hu- 
 mours, and the changes of fortune to which it is 
 subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind. 
 Hurd expands the view. Man is so constructed, 
 that whatever his condition may be — whether plea- 
 surable or painful — the imagination continually pre- 
 sents to the mind numberless varieties of pictures 
 
86 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 conformable to his situation. These images are 
 shaped and tinged by the circumstances of birth, 
 feeling, and employment. The exhibition of them 
 is the Poetry, and a just representation is the Art ot 
 dramatic writing. Supposing this outline to be ear- 
 nestly filled up, the Stage would become a school of 
 virtue, and Tragedy, in the words of Percy, be a 
 supplement to the Pulpit. 
 
 And this, according to his light, was the character 
 of the Greek dramatist. He instructed and enter- 
 tained. His page was solemnized by wisdom. It 
 was such a style that Milton included among the 
 evening amusements of his Thoughtful Man : 
 
 " Sometimes let gorgeous Tragedy 
 In sceptred pall come sweeping by, 
 Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, 
 Or the tale of Troy divine $ 
 Or what — though rare— of later age 
 Ennobled hath the buskin" d stage.'"'' 
 
 The choice of subject, not more than its treat- 
 ment, gave an educational tone to old Tragedy. The 
 writer selected the grandest features of national story. 
 It is found that a spectator is affected by the rank 
 and remoteness of the sufferer. Belisarius asking 
 an obolus is more touching than a blind sailor who 
 lost his sight before the mast. Hurd puts this 
 feeling with force : " The fall of a cottage by the 
 accidents of time and weather is almost unheeded, 
 whilst the ruins of a tower, which the neighbourhood 
 hath gazed at for ages with admiration, strike all 
 observers with concern. " And our own Shakspere 
 never charms us with so mighty a wand, as in his 
 portraits from history — 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 87 
 
 " When mid his bold design, 
 Before the Scot, afflicted and aghast, 
 
 The shadowy kings of Banquo's fated line 
 Through the dark cave in gleamy pageant passed." 
 
 The Drama is the book of the people. In all 
 countries the circumstances of a life, however rudely 
 displayed, possess an incomparable attraction. The 
 story-teller is the play-wright of Constantinople. 
 The adventures of an ancient Javanese prince will 
 hold a native assembly from evening until daylight. 
 Yet the properties consist only of a transparent 
 screen, with a large lamp behind it, and a hundred 
 painted puppets, twelve inches high, cut out of buf- 
 falo-hide. The poetry is a monotonous recitative, 
 and the action is confined to throwing the shadow of 
 each successive figure upon the curtain. 
 
 A dramatic poet wields the sceptre of the masses ; 
 he reaches the national heart through all its organs 
 of sensation. Eye and ear are his ministers. A 
 brave exploit is riveted in the audience. A fine say- 
 ing grows into an argument. When a moral pur- 
 pose animates the author, he works it through the 
 play. The commonest burlesque submits to the 
 oversight of conscience. 
 
 The Drama embraces and applies all the beauties 
 and decorations of Poetry. The sister arts attend 
 and adorn it. Spenser's lovely portraiture of Venus 
 finding Diana in the wood — 
 
 "While all her nymphs did, like a garland^ her enclose," 
 
 is vividly descriptive of the honours and services 
 which are rendered to the Muse of Tragedy. 
 Painting, Architecture, and Music, are her hand- 
 maids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect 
 
88 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 burn at her Show. All ages welcome her. An 
 eloquent admirer has indicated this universal in- 
 fluence. He points to the king, the statesman, and 
 the soldier, gathered before her to watch the anatomy 
 of the passions ; to the artist, combining the splen- 
 dour of costume and variety of characters into 
 gorgeous processions of his own ; to the old, living 
 over early days in recollection ; and to the young, 
 waiting with eager eyes and beating hearts for the first 
 rustle of the curtain, which is to discover, after each 
 rising fold, a new world of scenery, magnificence, 
 and life. 
 
 The Preacher tells us that laughter is mad, and 
 the Proverb of the Wise Man adds a warning 
 that the end of mirth is heaviness. There was a 
 deep moral in the Athenian law which interdicted 
 a judge of the Areopagus from writing a comedy. 
 The habit of looking at things on the ludicrous side 
 is always hurtful to the moral feelings. The plea- 
 sure is faint and vanishing, and leaves behind it an 
 apprehension of disgrace. RafFaelle and Hogarth, 
 Comus and the Tale of a Tub, are cut asunder by a 
 broad gulf. " It is not good to live in jest, since we 
 must die in earnest." 
 
 No other element of literature is so susceptible 
 and volatile as Wit. It comes in and goes out 
 with the moon ; when most flourishing, it has its 
 boundaries, from which, as Swift said, it may not 
 wander, upon peril of being lost. This geographical 
 chain has bound, with heavier or slighter links, the 
 pleasantry of Lucian, the buffoonery of Rabelais, the 
 pictures of Dryden, and the caricatures of Butler. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 89 
 
 The urbane gaiety of Horace alone preserves its 
 ! freedom, and travels over the world. 
 
 Humour, which is the pensiveness of Wit, enjoys 
 I a longer and a wider life. After one brilliant ex- 
 plosion, the repartee is worthless. The shrunken 
 I firework offends the eye ; but the quiet suggestive- 
 ! ness of Mr. Shandy is interesting as ever ; and the 
 : details of the great army in Flanders will last as 
 j long as the passage of Hannibal. Collins seems to 
 J indicate the poetical expression of Humour, as d ; s- 
 ! tinguished from the broader and coarser mirth : — 
 
 " But who is he whom now she views, 
 In robe of wild contending hues? 
 Thou by the Passions nursed, I greet 
 The comic sock that binds thy feet! 
 O Humour, thou whose name is known 
 To Britain's favoured isle alone j 
 Me, too, amidst thy band admit; 
 There where the young-eyed healthful Wit, 
 (Whose jewels in his crisped hair 
 Are placed each other's beams to share j 
 Whom no delights from thee divide) 
 In laughter loosed, attends thy side." 
 
 The pleasure of Shakspere's comedies rises from 
 their Humour. His smile is serious. Johnson 
 commended tragi-comedy, as giving a true reflection 
 of those grave and trifling incidents which compose 
 the scenes of experience. Joy and grief are never 
 far apart. In the same street the shutters of one 
 house are closed, while the curtains of the next are 
 brushed by shadows of the dance. A wedding- 
 party returns from church, and a funeral winds to its 
 door. The smiles and the sadnesses of life are the 
 tragi-comedy of Shakspere. Gladness and sighs 
 brighten and dim the mirror he beholds. In this 
 respect he differs from his contemporary, Ben 
 
0,0 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Jonson, in whom is enjoyed, in its richness, the 
 comedy of erudition. The Alchemist, the Silent 
 Woman, and Every Man in his Humour, are master- 
 pieces of a learned pencil. Fletcher may be relished 
 in his Elder Brother, and Massinger in his incom- 
 parable Sir Giles Overreach. 
 
 If the reader descends from the reigns of Elizabeth 
 and James into the time of the second Charles, his 
 gratifications of mirth are purchased by a wounded 
 conscience. Comedy has no whole place in its 
 body. Greek farce was riotous and insolent ; yet 
 fancy — like a summer breeze from a green farm — 
 sometimes refreshes the hot stage. Aristophanes 
 paints town-life with a suburb of gardens. But a 
 blade of grass never grew in the theatre of Farquhar 
 and his kindred. Wide was their scholarship in 
 wit :— 
 
 •* They sauntered Europe round, 
 And gathered every vice on Christian ground." 
 
 They cast nets over the old world and the new. 
 No venomous epigram, or sparkling idiom of sin, 
 escaped the throw. Every line glitters and stings. 
 Upon the whole, the pleasures of the drama — tragic 
 and cornic — are larger than its advantages. In the 
 bold figure of Cowley, it must be washed in the 
 Jordan to recover its health. A deep purpose of i 
 religion alone can make it useful to the people. | 
 Taste may purify it, but the disease continues. It 
 is only the water of Damascus to the leper. Of 
 English poets belonging to our golden age, Shakspere: 
 has the fewest scales. His vigour of constitution 
 threw off the ranker disease. With Fletcher's 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 9 1 
 
 vice and Decker's coarseness, he would have been 
 the fearfullest spectacle the world has beheld of 
 Genius retaining its power, and bereft of its light ; 
 and the Temple of our Poetry, bowed by his sacri- 
 legious arms, might have remained a monument of 
 supernatural strength, and sightless despair. 
 
 XVIII. — The Delights and Consolations of 
 Poetry. 
 
 Neither poet nor reader may reckon on the good 
 fortune of Metastasio, who gained a suit at Naples 
 by some extempore stanzas. A friend invited the 
 judge to her house, the poet pleaded in rhyme, and 
 in two or three days the Court decided in his favour. 
 Future invaders of India will scarcely imitate Alex- 
 ander, walking — in the lively extravagance of Dave- 
 nant — after the drum from Macedon, with Homer 
 in his pocket ; and Utopia must be erected among 
 the Affghans, before a captive regains his freedom 
 by a few verses of an English Euripides. 
 
 Poetry is its own reward. A consoler in life, it 
 soothes afflictions ; crowns poverty ; rocks asleep 
 sickness ; multiplies and refines pleasures ; endears 
 ! loneliness ; embellishes the common, and irradiates 
 the lovely. It is the natural religion of Literature. 
 Lord Bacon explained the old superstition that a 
 rainbow draws perfume from the ground it hangs 
 over, by supposing it to absorb the bloom of flowers. 
 The dream of science is a reality of song. That 
 
92 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Bow, which Fancy sets in the clouds of life, drinks 
 fragrance from all its many-coloured joys and sor- 
 rows. The hues which it gathers, it restores with 
 milder beauty. The barrenest way-side of want 
 and mourning looks green and cheerful under its 
 brooding line of shadow. 
 
 Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand 
 is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dis- 
 solve the fabric of beauty in which it dwells. Genii, 
 unknown to Arabian fable, wait at the portal. 
 Whatever is most precious from the loom, or the 
 mine of fancy, is poured at its feet. Love, purified 
 by contemplation, visits and cheers it. Unseen 
 musicians are heard in the dark. It is Psyche in 
 the palace of Cupid. 
 
 True Poetry, sincerely cherished, is a friend for 
 life. It accompanies us to all lands, and enjoys 
 health in every climate. Milton disembarks with 
 the Missionary in the Bay of Islands. The African 
 waggon is a litter for Horace. He who loves Ima- 
 gination and Pathos wears a ring upon his finger, 
 not less precious than that which Pliny tells us be- 
 longed to Pyrrhus, in which Nature had produced 
 the figure of Apollo and the nine Muses. The stone 
 answers the wish. Some happy messenger 
 
 " Of many a coloured plume sprinkled with gold" 
 
 comes to our call. The scene is changed. The 
 street of a great city slopes into a glade of Arcadia; 
 an Italian moon hangs large and glorious between 
 the mountain pines ; the shops brighten into gay 
 pavilions, and the trumpet of the tournament rings 
 out its challenge ; a magnificent kingdom of the 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 93 
 
 |East flashes through the smoke with all its pinnacles ; 
 |or a Tyrian sail catches the evening light, and swells 
 :softly in the still air of time. 
 
 What harmony and lustre such visions shed over 
 the tumult and fever of our cares ! And he who 
 jseeks, finds them: — 
 
 "In spite of all, 
 Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
 From our dark spirits." 
 
 The history of a great statesman exemplifies the 
 poetical enchantment. Pitt sometimes escaped from 
 the roar of contending parties at home and abroad, 
 into the solemn retirements of a favourite author. 
 He left the political elements to fight outside, and 
 barred the gates of Imagination upon the storm. 
 One visitor found him reading Milton aloud, with 
 strong emphasis, and so deeply engaged in Paradise, 
 as to have forgotten the presence of any people in 
 the world except Adam and Eve. Compare with 
 this happy portrait the confession of Sir Robert 
 Walpole to Mr. Fox, in the library at Houghton — 
 f I wish I took as much delight in reading as you 
 do : it would be the means of alleviating many 
 tedious hours in my present retirement ; but, to my 
 misfortune, I derive no pleasure from such pursuits." 
 
 Of course the finest taste has the richest enjoy- 
 ment, and catches in, in all its dewy lustre, 
 
 '* The landscape gliding swift 
 Athwart Imagination's vivid eye." 
 
 But in whatever degree the poetical feeling may 
 have been cultivated, the reward and the pleasure 
 will be insured. The Muse's stone has a homely 
 
94 ' PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 magic. The humblest appeal is never rejected. 
 The farmer, who has treasured a few lines of rural 
 description, may bind the sheaves upon his bed of 
 sickness ; the rose and the woodbine will trail their 
 clusters down the wall, and the broken light through 
 the curtains be changed into the tremulous glimmer 
 of elms on the village-green. Even the old squire, 
 no longer startling the woods with his horn, may 
 enjoy a quiet chase in metre, clear a hedge upon a 
 swift hexameter, and in pursuit of the u brush," 
 which was the pride and crown of his manhood, — 
 
 " Still scour the county in his elbow-chair." 
 
 How, in all times, have the Muse's enchantments 
 been worked ! O Queen of Wonders, what tears 
 hast thou dried ! What spirits hast thou sent to the 
 gifted in their sorrows, touching the mourner with a 
 silver wand, and wafting him into Elysium ! We 
 think of Milton, after the sight of his eyes had gone 
 from him, when the rays of early studies shone 
 across his path ; when the voices he loved in youth 
 — solemn notes of tragic, or livelier numbers of lyric 
 verse — stole into his ear out of the gloom -, and 
 nightingales sang as sweetly in Cripplegate, as when 
 the April leaf trembled in his father's garden. 
 
 We remember Camoens in all his trials ; whether 
 gazing on land and water from that rocky chair 
 built by Nature for him — and still called by his 
 name — upon an isthmus of the China seas; ship- 
 wrecked, with his Lusiad held above the waves, and 
 drifting upon a plank to shore j in Lisbon, waiting 
 in solitude and darkness the return of a black ser- 
 vant, who helped to feed his hunger with the alms 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 95 
 
 he begged ; or closing his eyes — a sick mendicant 
 and outcast — in a public hospital. 
 
 We follow Dante, homeless and destitute, with a 
 sentence of flames hanging over his head ; a wan- 
 derer from city to city in search of rest, having no 
 companion of his trials except the seven cantos of his 
 poem, which he had written before his banishment 
 from Florence ; finding in it his consolation, and 
 ever adding a stone to the fabric, as the storm that 
 beat on him through life cleared away into short in- 
 tervals of sunshine. We weep with Tasso, in the 
 Hospital of St. Anna, scared by the screams of ma- 
 niacs in the neighbouring cells, yet sometimes turn- 
 ing his thoughts to the correction of his Eastern 
 Story, and peopling the loneliness with the magnificent 
 tumult of a Crusade. 
 
 What upheld the buffeted Pilgrims of Fame in 
 their struggle and journey ? Doubtless they felt, in 
 all its fever, that passion for renown which the 
 noblest of the four called — 
 
 !"The spur which the clear spirit doth raise, 
 To scorn delight, and live laborious days." 
 
 But they had other and nearer joys. An ani- 
 mating, mastering sense of music lived in their 
 •hearts, finding utterance in tones more lulling than 
 the south-west wind of the Arcadia, which, in the 
 ear of Sidney, crept " over flowery fields and sha- 
 dowed waters in the heat of summer." Happy eyes 
 that make pictures when they are shut ! The fra- 
 grant shades of a visionary world enclosed their 
 melody, as thick leaves bury the singing birds when 
 lightnings are abroad. However wintry the path 
 
96 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 might be, they knew of sunny banks and gardens, 
 where the violets were always blowing, and lutes 
 being touched by radiant ringers. 
 
 They were conscious of the Muse's presence in 
 sudden streams of bloom and lustre upon the air. 
 Even the strokes of hatred and persecution lost their 
 power, or dropped with a blunted edge. For 
 Homer's Goddess, warding off the dart from her fa- 
 vourite, is ever an allegory of the Poet on the battle- 
 field of the world, where Beauty — his mind's mother 
 — throws forward her bright garment, and intercepts 
 the arrow from the enemy's bow. 
 
 And thus it happens that the poet, rich irj his 
 poverty, carries with him sweet grapes to quench 
 his thirst, and greenest branches to shelter his re- 
 pose. The stormy day is better for him than the 
 calm. We are told by Naturalists that birds of 
 Paradise fly best against the wind ; it drifts behind 
 them the gorgeous train of feathers, which only en- 
 tangles their flight with the gale. Pure Imagination, 
 of which the loveliest of winged creatures is the 
 fitting emblem, seems always to gain in vigour and 
 grace by the tempests it encounters, and in contrary 
 winds to show the brightest plumage. 
 
 It is a happy feature of English teaching that the. 
 child is fed so largely with poetical fruit. A love of 
 the good and the beautiful is thus entwined with the 
 growing mind, and becomes a part of it. Sometimes 
 the muscular ivy does not clasp the oak with a j 
 stronger embrace. A remembered verse is pleasing for 
 its own sake, and for the associations which it revives. , 
 When Sir Joshua Reynolds, with other English 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 97 
 
 j visitors to the Opera in Venice, heard a ballad which 
 • was played in every street of London before they left 
 jit, the tears rushed to their eyes, and home, with all 
 •its endearments and friends, rose before them. 
 
 " Such is the secret union, when we feel 
 A song — a flower —a name — at once restore 
 The attention." 
 
 I Most affectingly has a living historian expressed the 
 
 | feeling of unnumbered hearts ; — " They who have 
 
 I known what it is when afar from books, in solitude, 
 
 ' or in travelling, or in intervals of worldly care, to 
 
 feed on poetical recollections, to recall the sentiments 
 
 and images which retain by association the charm 
 
 that early years once gave them — they will feel the 
 
 inestimable value of committing to the memory, in 
 
 the prime of its power, what it will easily receive 
 
 1 and indelibly retain." 
 
 Nor if the gathering of flowers sometimes awake 
 an ambition to grow them — if the reader, smitten 
 with love of an ode, set himself to produce one — is 
 the injury to his own mind, or the inconvenience to 
 his friends, likely to be of particular moment. He 
 may mistake his calling and his powers — may be- 
 lieve himself born to write, instead of to judge -, but 
 next to excellence is the desire of it. A poem that 
 bloomed through the little day of domestic reputa- 
 tion, often blends itself healthfully with the atmo- 
 sphere of home ; as the rose, after its leaves are 
 strewed on the ground, mingles its odours with the 
 air, and continues a purifying work when its colour 
 has departed. 
 
 Poetry is born to be the companion of youth. 
 
 H 
 
98 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Those hours may be fleeting as they are fair. The 
 flower of the grass is not withered sooner. Tempta- 
 tions and cares overleap the garden. A blazing 
 sword appears at the gate. The hard paths of toil 
 are to be trodden; the soil of life is to be tilled. 
 But why should Manhood and Poetry no longer 
 take sweet counsel together, and walk through the 
 world as friends ? Age, with its bereavements and 
 compensations, will endear them more and more to 
 each other. Do not take away a companion that 
 dries the tear, and a voice that sings in the night. 
 Whatever ills befall them by the way, let Youth and 
 Fancy go out of Paradise hand-in-hand. 
 
 XIX. — Fiction : The Romance and the 
 Novel. 
 
 A poem, unfettered by metre and rhythm, takes the 
 name of Romance. The genealogy of fiction fur- 
 nishes another proof of the diffusion of mental 
 pleasures. The same stories appear with an altered , 
 complexion. The cat of Whittington made the [ 
 fortune of a merchant of Genoa, as well as of a lord p 
 mayor of London. Llywellin's greyhound has a n 
 second grave very distant from that of Bethgelert. B 
 It sleeps and points a moral in Persia. Dear Red J 
 Riding Hood puts off her cloak by a Danish fireside. 
 The dart of Abaris, which carried the philosopher 
 whithersoever he desired it, gratifies later enthusiasts 
 in travel, as the Cap of Fortunatus and the space- 
 compelling boots of the nursery hero. The helmet 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 99 
 
 of Pluto, which protected Perseus in his desperate 
 combat with Medusa, has frequently shielded 
 humbler heads as the Fog-cap of the north ; while 
 the ring of Gyges transferred its advantages of 
 secresy to the mask of Arthur. 
 
 For practical purposes, Prose-fiction may be 
 divided into two kinds : (i) the Romance, which is 
 the legend of heroic ; and (2) the Novel, which is 
 the news of common life. The Romance flourishes 
 in the ignorance, the Novel in the refinement of a 
 nation. The fourteenth century asked for exploits 
 of Charlemagne ; the nineteenth, how the Duke of 
 Fair-light dines. The same feeling may still be 
 traced in the contrasts of barbarism and civilization. 
 The wild Arab by his watch-fire, listens out the 
 night to the music of spears in the fierce foray ; the 
 Japanese gentleman, mooring his splendid boat 
 under a tree, hears his fashionable tale from the 
 story-teller, who collects the gossip of his neigh- 
 bourhood. 
 
 With ourselves Fiction is only one of the count- 
 less pleasures by which curiosity is amused. But to 
 remoter students it presented the collected charms 
 of literature. We can hardly realize the fascinations 
 of Romance in ages, when ability to read a book 
 was a rarer accomplishment than the writing of it 
 'would be at present. A Gothic story, before the 
 press vulgarized wonders, was a treasure to be cata- 
 logued with the statutes of the realm. The will of 
 a Scottish baronet, in 1390, includes both in the 
 pame bequest. Such a book was the pride of the eyes : 
 
 "Princes and kings received the wondrous gift, 
 And ladies read the work they could not lift." 
 
100 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 The scribe, the artist, and the binder, lavished 
 their time and skill. Six years were not unfre- 
 quently spent upon the internal decorations. The 
 margin, in the place of canvas, was enriched with 
 portraits, magnificent dresses, flowers, and fruits. 
 Letters of silver shone on a purple ground. Golden 
 roses studded a covering of crimson velvet ; and 
 clasps of precioug metal, richly chased, shut up the 
 adventurous knights and the radiant damsels in their 
 splendid home. Wonderful were the doings within ! 
 Crabbe has playfully unfolded some of them in 
 harmonious verse : — 
 
 " Hark! hollow blasts through empty courts resound, 
 And shadowy forms with staring eyes stalk round j 
 See ! moats and bridges, walls and castles rise, 
 Ghosts, fairies, demons, dance before our eyes j 
 Lo ! magic verse inscribed on golden gate, 
 And bloody hand that beckons on to fate. 
 ' And who art thou, thou little page unfold ? 
 Say, doth thy lord my Claribel withhold? 
 Go, tell him straight — Sir Knight, thou must resign 
 The captive Queen : for Claribel is mine.' 
 Away he flies ; and now for bloody deeds, 
 Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds } 
 The Giant falls j his recreant throat I seize, 
 And from his corslet take the massy keys." 
 
 The Knight and Lady of high degree did no' 
 keep these worthies to themselves. Over their 
 ample pages, poetical eyes in the sixteenth and sevenn 
 teenth centuries pored with untiring satisfaction.; 
 Southey discovered in the Amadis of Gaul the Zel-j 
 mane of the Arcadia, the Masque of Cupid of the^ 
 Faery ®>ueen, and the Florizel of the Winter^ 
 Tale. 
 
 The Romance of chivalry replaced the Heroic ir. 
 a reduced and feeble copy. It was the incredible" 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 101 
 
 in water-colours. We miss the giants and the en- 
 chanters with their enormous capacities. Things that 
 never could be done, are, indeed, accomplished in 
 every page ; but the actors look diminutive and tame. 
 They want the dauntless vivacity of their predeces- 
 sors. The epic of falsehood was closed. 
 
 Years passed by, and Fiction put on another 
 shape, and received the name, without the inherit- 
 ance, of Minerva. Mediaeval exaggerations were 
 clothed in modern dresses. Giants, living in im- 
 pregnable castles, gave way to heroes of praeterna- 
 tural stature in their sentiments, who raved through 
 four volumes — sometimes five — for dark ladies of 
 impossible beauty. What a geography was theirs ! 
 Puck found himself out-run. The chronicler of the 
 sayings and doings of the Black Penitents put a 
 girdle round the world, in considerably less than 
 forty minutes. Time and space were mere circum- 
 stances. Kingdoms fraternized. Constantinople 
 abutted on Moorflelds ; and Julius Caesar conquered 
 Mexico with Cortes. Probability was despised. 
 Everything came to pass when it was wanted ; and 
 the healthiest people died the moment they were in 
 the way. 
 
 The incidents of these tales resembled drop- 
 curtains in small theatres. The effect was terrible. 
 The Vicar's daughter, watching a fine sunset from 
 the churchyard, was ruthlessly carried ofF by banditti, 
 who stepped out of a Salvator on purpose. Perhaps 
 the scene was laid in a mountain-country, and then, 
 about the middle of the first volume, a sentimental 
 youth was entranced, during a moonlight walk, by 
 
102 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 unearthly strains of music proceeding from a lady 
 n white muslin, who stood with her harp upon a 
 pinnacle of frozen snow, where the wild goat, in 
 these prosaic days, would not find a footing. These 
 extravagances melted before the dazzling creations 
 of Scott, and a fourth class of Fiction delighted the 
 world. 
 
 I am not competent to speak of later styles and 
 performances, and will not venture to say whether 
 the irony of Cowper be applicable to our own 
 days : — 
 
 " And novels — witness every month's Review, — 
 Belie their name, and offer nothing new." 
 
 But the hastiest observer cannot fail to mark that 
 in gay, as in graver efforts, our century is the era of 
 revised editions. Richardson, Smollett, and their 
 contemporaries, come out in clever abridgments, 
 adapted to the changes of taste, and under various 
 titles. Old friends revisit us with new faces. Amelia j 
 has watched the dying embers for a dozen husbands, 
 since Fielding left her; and Uncle Toby's mellow' 
 tones have startled us down a college staircase, and' 
 through the railings of counting-houses in the City. ■ 
 Gentlemen and heroines from whom we parted many'^ 
 years ago, with slight respect for their attainments!' 
 and morals, have now taken a scientific, or a serious^ 
 turn. Lovelace is absorbed in entomology ; and^ 
 Lady Bellaston is a rubber of brasses. 
 
 In considering the objects of Prose fiction, I am 
 led to think it most useful, as it is most poetical.: 
 The grandest outlines of character afford the health-.^ 
 fullest examples. On this account, heroic and chi-i. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IO3 
 
 valrous legends have peculiar advantages. Their 
 colossal virtues are links between the human and a 
 higher organization. They show a sort of middle 
 life. Imagination presenting to the mind ideal forms 
 of beauty and courage, is a faint shadow of Faith, by 
 which the unseen things of another existence are 
 brought in later years before us. An ennobling ele- 
 ment of thought is wanted ; and a reflective observer 
 predicted a deficiency of generous, brave, and devout 
 feelings in the manhood of a person, in whose youth 
 he discovered a severe restriction of the mind to bare 
 truth and minute accuracy, with dislike of the fanci- 
 ful, the tender, and the magnificent. Johnson 
 seems to have held the same opinion. Writing to 
 Mrs. Thrale about the education of her daughter, he 
 said : — " She will go back to her arithmetic again, — 
 a science suited to Sophy's cast of mind ; for you 
 told me in the last winter that she loved metaphysics 
 more than romances. Her choice is certainly laud- 
 able, as it is uncommon ; but / would have her like 
 what is good in both" If life be a curious web, 
 which each man and woman are obliged to weave, 
 why should not a thread of gold run through the 
 woof ? There is a better quality even than prudence. 
 We meet people every day who think themselves 
 wise because they are selfish. Cut a leaf from a 
 ledger, and you have their life. 
 
 The importance of the Romantic element does 
 not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies 
 abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impres- 
 sions of virtue to works of fiction ; and Adam Clarke 
 gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. 
 
104 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spi- 
 ritual world ; and he felt sure of having been a 
 coward, but for romances. He declared that he 
 had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbour, 
 and himself, from Robinson Crusoe^ than from all the 
 books — except the Bible — that were known to his 
 youth. These grateful recollections never forsook 
 him, and the story of De Foe was put into the hands 
 of his children as soon as they were able to read it. 
 Sir Alexander Ball informed Coleridge that he 
 was drawn to the Navy, in childhood, by the 
 pictures which this Ancient Mariner left on his 
 mind. 
 
 It would be an idle endeavour to answer all the 
 objections which have been urged against Fiction. 
 But on one of the perils most earnestly deprecated 
 — the disregard of harmony between the means and 
 the end — a few remarks may be offered. Let me 
 take the objector's own case, and put it in stronger; 
 colours, after this manner. A young man is in love 
 with a lady of higher station, who is not blind to his; 
 merits; but her parents talk of settlements, and he< 
 has nothing but hope. How is the difficulty to be; 
 overcome ? In the easiest way. Twenty years ago, i 
 a gentleman came to London from the New Forest,/ 
 rejected and desperate. All his affections were! 
 shattered. With one wrench he cast off his 1 ' 
 country and his attachment together. He sails; 
 to India; works hard; gets promoted ; and comes it 
 home with two hundred thousand pounds and^ 
 a portfolio of tigers. What has he to do with ! 
 the story ? Everything. This fortunate adventurer 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IO5 
 
 is the lover's uncle, although nobody knew of 
 the relationship. Well ; he has landed at Ports- 
 mouth, and is riding leisurely by a dark wood 
 to look at a house which is to let, with a small port- 
 manteau strapped on his horse. This is the mo- 
 ment. Three footpads spring from the trees ; 
 robbery and murder seem inevitable, when his 
 nephew — the young man who could not get mar- 
 ried, and who had been reading Hammond's Elegies 
 on a stile — rushes to the rescue. The plunderers 
 disappear ; the kinsmen recognize each other ; the 
 brave defender receives on the spot a cheque for ten 
 thousand pounds, and departs by the night-coach to 
 tell the news to Cecilia. Of course, every difficulty 
 vanishes ; the marriage is solemnized, and the last 
 chapter ends in a peal. 
 
 Now, suppose this adventure, in all its absurdity, 
 to be really written and read, who is likely to be in- 
 jured by it? Is it worth a moralist's trouble to work 
 himself into a frenzy, and say that his " indignation 
 is excited at the immoral tendency of such lessons 
 to young readers, who are thus taught to undervalue 
 and reject all sober, regular plans for compassing an 
 object, and to muse on improbabilities, till they 
 become foolish enough to expect them ? " 
 
 In the first place, it may be denied that one 
 young man in a million ever built his hopes of pro- 
 sperity or love, upon recollections of visionary re- 
 latives in Benares. Even real uncles are forgotten 
 when they never return. And, secondly, it is not 
 to be assumed that the remote contingencies of life 
 ought to be always rejected as hurtful. Good 
 
106 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 fortune is an useful delusion. The improbabilities 
 of experience are many, the impossibilities are few. 
 The rich kinsman may not arrive from India to 
 make two hearts happy ; but circumstances do fall 
 out in a way altogether contrary to expectation ; 
 helping friends rise up quite as strangely as ap- 
 paritions of Nabobs from the jungle; and the 
 dearest chains of affection are sometimes riveted by 
 means scarcely less astonishing, and certainly not 
 more anticipated, than the magical cheque of the 
 dreamer. Instead, therefore, of starting from a ro- 
 mantic danger, I am inclined, under proper limita- 
 tions, to welcome a moral advantage. It is 
 something to keep the spirits up in so long and 
 harassing a journey ; and even the pack-horse goes 
 better with his bells. 
 
 This conclusion invites me to remember another 
 pleasure which Prose Fiction shares with Poetic, in 
 withdrawing its readers, for a while, from the dis- 
 comforts of their condition. It pours sunlight on 
 the dingiest window, and sows a hedge of roses 
 round a ruinous dwelling. Sterne justly commended 
 it for cheating fear and sorrow of many weary mo- 
 ments, and leading the traveller from the hard road 
 to stray upon enchanted ground. Naturally, the 
 writer himself feels the liveliest power of the spell. 
 Rousseau wrote the letters of Julia on small sheets 
 of paper, which he folded and read in his walks, with 
 as much rapture as if they had been sent to him by 
 the post; and Richardson wept for Clementina, as 
 for a real sufferer. The reader enjoys the same 
 enchantment according to his sensibility. Petrarch 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IC 
 
 was so affected by Boccaccio's story of Griseldis, 
 that he wished, as he assured his friend, to get it by 
 heart ; and he mentions a scholar who, having un- 
 dertaken to read it to a company, was interrupted by 
 his tears. 
 
 If we look into biography, we find that the most 
 refined and the strongest thinkers — the theologian^ 
 the poet, and the metaphysician — have turned a kind 
 I eye upon Fiction, which has beguiled the leisure and 
 refreshed the toils of Gray and Warburton, of 
 Locke and Crabbe. 
 
 One advantage of this kind of literature deserves 
 to be specified with particular earnestness. It gives 
 instruction in amusement. Addison acknowledged 
 that he would rather inform than divert his reader ; 
 but he recollected that a man must be familiar with 
 | wisdom before he willingly enters on Seneca and 
 I Epictetus. Fiction allures him to the severe task 
 by a gayer preface. Embellished truths are the illu- 
 minated alphabet of larger children. " We endure 
 reproofs from our friends in leather jackets," re- 
 marked a scholar to the lively lady of Streatham, 
 " which we should never support if pronounced by 
 our contemporaries in lace and tissue." 
 
 Fiction, like the drama, speaks to our hearts by 
 exhibitions. Mr. Allworthy was acting a sermon 
 upon charity, when the gentle pressure of the strange 
 infant's hand on one of his fingers — seeming to im- 
 plore assistance — outpleaded, in a moment, the in- 
 dignant proposal of Mrs. Deborah to put it in a 
 warm basket — as the night was rainy — and lay it at 
 the Churchwarden's door \ Corporal Trim's illustra- 
 
108 PLEASURES, OUJECTS, AND 
 
 tion of death, by the falling hat in the kitchen, strikes 
 the fancy more than a climax of Sherlock ; and the 
 Vicar of Wakefield in the prison is a whole library 
 of theology made vocal. 
 
 In exact proportion to the facility and the vivid- 
 ness of the lesson, must be the oversight of its cha- 
 racter. Richardson never sustained so heavy a blow 
 as one of the least susceptible of essayists inflicted, 
 when reading Pamela on the grass of Primrose Hill, 
 and being joined by a friendly damsel, who desired 
 to read in company, he confessed, " I could have 
 wished it had been any other book." However in- 
 geniously the highly-coloured scenes of the classic 
 novelists may be defended, the sober judgment will 
 never be convinced. To say that they conduct the: 
 history to its catastrophe, and have their sting drawn, 
 by the moral, is like telling us to live tranquilly over 
 a cellar of combustibles, because an engine with 
 abundance of water is at the end of the street. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott regarded the vices and follies of 
 Fielding's celebrated hero as those which the world:, 
 soon teaches to all, and to which society is accus-, 
 tomed to show so much forbearance. But it has, 
 been well observed, that he neglected to estimate the* 
 extent to which that false indulgence may be the} 
 effect of an immoral literature, operating through a : 
 long course of years upon the individual minds of} 
 which society is composed. Men are quickly accli-* 
 matized in sin ; and the eye, familiar with disease, is^ 
 not offended by a few spots on the page. 
 
 During the early popularity of Smollett and Field- Z 
 ing, Johnson contributed some wise suggestions- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IO9 
 
 respecting the employment of Fiction. He advised 
 the novelist to display virtue in its ideal beauty, not 
 angelical, or improbable — because we only imitate 
 what we believe — but the purest and the noblest 
 within our reach. This selected character he wished 
 to be carried through the various changes and trials 
 of life, in order that by its victories and its patience 
 — by the afflictions it vanquished or endured — we 
 may be taught what to hope and what to perform. 
 His concluding sentence is fatal to the greatest names 
 in the art: — "Vice should always disgust; nor 
 should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, 
 be so united with it as to reconcile it to the mind. 
 Whenever it appears it should raise hatred by the 
 malignity of its practices, and the meanness of its 
 stratagems ; for while it is supported by parts or 
 spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred." 
 
 Such are some of the pleasures and advantages of 
 Fiction. As the Romance, its object is to raise the 
 mind by proposing to it for imitation characters of 
 purity, courage, and patience ; as the Novel, its 
 work is to check and amend the little weaknesses of 
 temper, by humbling reflections of them upon the 
 mirror of the tale. When Fiction fulfils one or 
 other of these duties, it obtains a good report, and 
 deserves to be numbered among the aids to education. 
 The finer feelings are called forth, and objectionable 
 peculiarities are repressed. If this result, in some 
 measure at least, be not produced, the amusement is 
 vain. Emotions are worthless which do not grow 
 into deeds ; and the glass of manners is consulted to 
 no purpose, unless the defect which it exhibits be re- 
 
110 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 moved or weakened. The fruit of Fiction, regarded 
 only as a luxury, will always be bitter ; and we may 
 expect to find the hard saying confirmed, which ac- 
 cused it of enervating the understanding and corrupt- 
 ing the heart. 
 
 XX. — History: its Charms and Lessons. 
 
 History presents the pleasantest features of Poetry 
 and Fiction ; — the majesty of the Epic ; the moving 
 accidents of the Drama ; the surprises and moral 
 of the Romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector ; Ro- 
 binson Crusoe is not stranger than Croesus ; the 
 Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott 
 with richer lights of lance and armour, than the Car- 
 thaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy. 
 Froissart's hero has all the minute painting of 
 Richardson's. The poetic element is the life-blood 
 of the narrative. The gazette glows into the dramas 
 the pen-and-ink scrawl into the portrait. 
 
 History, in its simplest shape, is the account of a 
 journey to investigate a country, its inhabitants, or 
 one particular character. St. Paul told the Galatians 
 that he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter — meaning 
 to say, that he visited the Apostle to make himself 
 more familiar with his mind and feelings. If 
 St. Paul had written all that he saw and heard 
 during the fifteen days of his abode, it would have 
 been a " history." Of this pure form Hero- 
 dotus offers the largest and the best specimens. His 
 narrative is generally founded upon his observation. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. Ill 
 
 He surveyed the battle-fields he describes, and keep- 
 
 ! ingno regular journal, but relying upon memory and 
 
 ! a few notes, he fell into some inaccuracies. For the 
 
 ! most part, however, he has the freshness of an eye- 
 
 | witness. His picture of Egypt is a moving pano- 
 
 I rama of the Nile. Into whatever region he travels, 
 
 | he makes the reader a companion ; whether he gazes 
 
 I upon the superb palace of Sais and its lighted hall of 
 
 i odours, the sepulchral Pyramids, or Babylon — even 
 
 I then in her waning splendour — as she rose to the 
 
 ' Prophet's eye, " the glory of kingdoms, the beauty 
 
 ' of the Chaldees* excellency." The interest of this 
 
 familiar manner is lively and lasting, recalling that 
 
 pleasant garrulity of Commines, which led an old 
 
 French critic to say, that in reading him he seemed 
 
 to be in the company of an honest gentleman who 
 
 fought all his battles over again when the cloth was 
 
 removed. 
 
 The same feeling of reality, in a severer tone, 
 pleases us in Thucydides. Recording the troubles 
 of Peloponnesus, he is Wellington telling the story 
 of the Peninsular War. To the same class, in 
 ancient days, belong Sallust and Tacitus -, in modern, 
 Guicciardini and Clarendon. 
 
 The second manifestation of History is that of 
 Narrative founded on information drawn from others. 
 It is Paul's visit to Peter related by Luke ; or, the 
 Spanish expedition of Scipio told by Polybius on the 
 testimony of Laslius. Our venerable Bede is a 
 humbler example. 
 
 History, in its third variety, loses the authority of 
 observation. The only eye-sight employed is the 
 
112 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 critical. State papers replace witnesses. Johnson 
 indicated one of the immediate inconveniences of this 
 change : — " He who describes what he never saw, 
 draws from Fancy. Robertson paints minds, as Sir 
 Joshua paints faces in a history-piece." 
 
 History may be considered in three lights — a 
 pleasurable, an educational, and a moral: (i) as it 
 entertains the fancy ; (2) opens new sources of in- 
 struction ; (3) and cheris'hes, or enlarges the feelings 
 of virtue. In the first light, its poetical relationship 
 is clearly marked. Imagination creates no grander 
 episodes than the rise and fall of empires. To watch 
 the first smiles and motions of national life in its 
 cradle ; to trace the growth, the maturity, and the 
 decline of kingdoms ; to observe one side of the 
 world brightening in the sun of civilization, while 
 the other is vapoury and cold ; to see, in the course 
 of years, the flourishing region become dim, and the 
 dark country glimmer into warmth ; Athens ascend- 
 ing into daylight, and Egypt sinking into shadow ; 
 learning setting over Greece to rise upon Italy ; and 
 dying at Rome to be rekindled at Bagdad : — these 
 are visions to dazzle the eyes, and people the fancy 
 of a poet. 
 
 It may be questioned whether the modern seve- 
 rity of research be as profitable as it is ingenious. 
 Thucydides no longer weeps at the recitation of 
 Herodotus. Legends of beauty continually disappear, 
 and the rents in history become plainer as the ivy is j 
 torn away. Some eyes look sorrowfully upon this 
 reformation. In the exquisite image of Landor, it is 
 like breaking off a crystal from the vault of a twi- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. II3 
 
 light cavern, out of mere curiosity to see where the 
 ! accretion ends and the rock begins. 
 
 The historian has one advantage over the poet. 
 
 j He is not obliged to look abroad for shining illustra- 
 
 j tions, or corresponding scenes of action. His images 
 
 j are ready ; his field of combat is enclosed. He 
 
 ! wants only so much vivacity as will supply colour 
 
 and life to the description. Read the meeting of 
 
 j Cyrus and Artaxerxes in Xenophon. A white cloud 
 
 : spots the horizon ; presently it grows bigger, and is 
 
 discovered to be the dust raised by an enormous 
 
 I army. As the cloud advances, its lower edge of 
 
 mist is seen to glitter in the sun ; spear, and helm, 
 
 and shield, shoot forth and vanish, and soon the 
 
 ranks of horse and foot, with the armed chariots, 
 
 grow distinctly visible. This is the splendour of the 
 
 epic ; it is Homer in prose. 
 
 In a different manner, take Drinkwater's descrip- 
 tion of the burning of the Spanish batteries at the 
 siege of Gibraltar. The flames spread ; a column 
 of fire, rolling from the works, lights up the soldiers 
 and every surrounding object ; ship after ship is 
 caught in the conflagration ; the sea is dyed in a 
 red blaze, and through the canopy of smoke the 
 English artillery hurl terrible missiles. Tacitus, 
 whom Warton calls a great poet, might furnish 
 many dark scenes ; as the sufferings of the Roman 
 army under Caecina, the dying watch-fires, the trou- 
 bled slumbers, and the spectre dabbled in gore. A 
 volume of Livy is a portfolio of sketches. 
 
 For an instance of the dramatic in modern history, 
 the reader may go to Dalrymple. Dundee, wander- 
 
 I 
 
114 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 ing about Lochabar with a few miserable followers, 
 is roused by news of an English army in full march 
 to the Pass of Killicranky. His hopes revive. He 
 collects his scattered bands, and falls upon the enemy 
 filing out of the stern gateway into the Highlands. 
 In fourteen minutes infantry and cavalry are broken, 
 Dundee, foremost in pursuit, as in attack, outstrips 
 his people ; he stops, and waves his hand to quicken 
 their speed ; while he is pointing eagerly to the 
 Pass, a musket-ball pierces his armour. He rides 
 from the field, but soon dropping from his horse, is 
 laid under the shade of trees that stood near ; when 
 he has recovered of the faintness, he desires his 
 attendants to lift him up, and turning his eyes to the 
 field of combat, inquires, " How things went ? I 
 Being told that all is well, he replies with calm satis- 
 faction, " Then I am well ! " and expires. 
 
 Our poets have drawn splendid pictures of heroes 
 falling in battle. Ben Jonson gives Catiline with 
 the fierce hands still moving among the slain ; Burns i 
 exhibits the warrior holding forth a bloody welcome' 
 to death, and breathing his last sigh in a faint 
 huzza ; and Scott surpassed both in Marmion waving 
 his broken sword over his head, and shouting,; 
 " Victory ! " But the closing scene of Dundee is" 
 the most affecting. Every circumstance heightens 
 the catastrophe. His bed is the wild heather, shut 1 
 in by a mountain bastion, of which the gloom is. 
 broken by frequent flashes of random guns. The' 
 Pass stretches in dreary twilight before us. The 
 sound is in our ears of a dark river, foaming among 
 splintered rocks — ever tumbling down and losing. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 15 
 
 itself in thick trees, while the eagle utters a lonely- 
 scream over the carnage, and sails away into the 
 rolling vapours. 
 
 History, enjoying the pomp and circumstance of 
 
 Poetry, is confined within narrower boundaries, and 
 
 governed by stricter laws. Its portraits ought to 
 
 be likenesses, so far as the writer's industry may 
 
 acquaint him with the features of his characters. 
 
 1 Peter the Great is always brutal on one side ; and 
 
 I the senatorial dignity of Titian only allegorizes a 
 
 ' French Convention. 
 
 Popular opinion allows more liberty to the pen 
 and the pencil. It makes faithfulness subordinate to 
 impression. Hannibal is never to be one-eyed, nor 
 Marshal Ve'ndome hump-backed. The fame of a 
 statesman must be written on his face, and the vic- 
 tories of a general in his muscles. No lean hand 
 may grasp the spear of Achilles. A Dutch Scipio 
 shuffles off the Burgomaster, and strides into his 
 frame in a toga. 
 
 This view is encouraged by Reynolds, speaking 
 the sentiment of an age when Garrick played Mac- 
 beth in a court-dress, with bag- wig and sword ; 
 and West astonished the world of Art by exhibiting 
 the Death of Wolfe in all the simple grandeur of its 
 truth. Reynolds, indeed, acknowledged his error 
 in that half-hour which he spent before the finished 
 i picture of the hero ; yet it may be conjectured that his 
 j prejudice was rather modified than removed. His 
 J theory of classical dignity in general would probably 
 j remain as it was before ; and the ennobled presence 
 of St. Paul in the Cartoon be still the object of his 
 
Il6 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 admiration. The Epical prince of Raffaelle may be 
 nearer to nature than the vulgar mechanic of Bas- 
 sano ; but the thoughtful eye looks for a middle 
 form of expression, which shall be heroic, while it is 
 real, and familiar, without being common. A 
 painter is a historian writing with a pencil. But 
 would Aquila and his wife have recognized their 
 Hebrew brother — " in his bodily presence mean" — 
 who abode with them, and wrought at Corinth ? or 
 Lydia, the seller of purple, have known, by a 
 glance, the stranger whom she met along the river- 
 side at Philippi ? The moral of an exploit vanishes 
 in the exaggeration of the doer. Surely that art 
 is the truest which preserves and dignifies a defect. 
 Let Agesilaus keep his hobble j and the Emperor's 
 neck be awry in the marble. Show Falkland with 
 an ungainly figure, and a rustic face brightened by' 
 inward beauty. Are we to look for a hero whose ; 
 nobility is of the soul, and to behold only the tallest 
 grenadier of the column ? Why should Johnson's* 
 eyes be alike upon canvas ? Is Milton to be cropped- 
 in a frontispiece ? 
 
 We have an example of this false history-painting- 
 in the story of Nelson's coat at Trafalgar. He is^ 
 reported to have silenced the affectionate importunity^ 
 of his officers, entreating him to conceal the stars; 
 on his breast, by saying, " In honour I gained 
 them, and in honour I will die with them." This 
 is the heroic stature of the Great Style. Tacitus' 
 could not have put a finer sentiment into the mouth 
 of Agricola. But its merit is simply imaginative 2 
 Dr. Arnold heard the facts from Sir Thomas Hardy, 1 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. II7 
 
 Nelson wore on the day of the battle the same coat 
 which he had worn for weeks, having the Order of 
 the Bath embroidered upon it ; and when his friend 
 expressed some apprehension of the badge, he an- 
 swered him that he was aware of the danger, but 
 that it was " too late then to shift a coat." 
 
 This circumstance suggests a caution not to look 
 for great causes of great things. A pamphlet often 
 unlocks an octavo. Nothing is too contemptible to 
 make a political catastrophe. The Peace of Utrecht 
 was a squabble of the bedchamber \ and we have the 
 assurance of Burke that the war-cry of Walpole's 
 enemies was only the hunger of Party breaking its 
 chain. 
 
 (2.) History is to be regarded in an educational 
 light, as it opens new sources of information. A 
 scholar may be six thousand years eld, and have 
 learned brick-making under Pharaoh. Never lived 
 such a citizen of the world ; he was Assyrian at 
 Babylon, Lacedaemonian at Sparta, Roman at Rome, 
 Egyptian at Alexandria. He has been by turns a 
 traveller, a merchant, a man of letters, and a com- 
 mander-in-chief ; presented at every court, he knew 
 Daniel, and sauntered through the picture-gallery of 
 Richelieu. Dryden called history a perspective 
 ^lass, carrying the mind to a vast distance, and 
 taking in the remotest objects of antiquity. 
 
 How many battles by sea and land the student 
 has witnessed ! He clambered with the Greeks 
 along the rocky shore of Pylus ; he heard the roar of 
 falling houses when the Turks stormed Rhodes ; 
 three times he was beaten back with Conde by that 
 
1 18 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 terrible Spanish infantry, which tossed off the French 
 fire like foam from a cliff; he recognized Dante in 
 the struggle of Campaldino ; stood by the side of 
 Cervantes when an arquebus carried away his left 
 hand ; and stooped with a misty lantern over the 
 bleeding body of Moore. 
 
 A cultivated reader of History is domesticated in 
 all families ; he dines with Pericles, and sups with 
 Titian. The Athenian fish-bell often invites him to 
 the market to cheapen a noisy poulterer, or exchange 
 compliments with a bakeress of inordinate fluency. 
 A monk illuminating a Missal, and Caxton pulling 
 his first Proof, are among the pleasant entries of his 
 diary. He still stops his ears to the bellowing of 
 Cleon ; and remembers, as of yesterday, the rhetori- 
 cal frown of the old tapestry, and the scarlet drapery 
 of Pitt. 
 
 To study History is to study literature. The 
 biography of a nation embraces all its works. No 
 trifle is to be neglected. A mouldering medal is a 
 letter of twenty centuries. Antiquities, which have 
 been beautifully called History defaced, compose its 
 fullest commentary. In these wrecks of many 
 storms, which Time washes to the shore, the scholar 
 looks patiently for treasure. The painting round a 
 vase, the scribble on a wall, the wrath of a dema- 
 gogue, the drollery of a farce, the point of an epi- 
 gram — each possesses its own interest and value. 
 A fossil court of law is dug out of an orator; 
 and the Pompeii of Greece is discovered in the 
 Comedies of Aristophanes. 
 
 Lord Bacon denounced abridgments with eloquent 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IIQ 
 
 anger. But who can traverse all history ? When 
 Johnson was asked by Boswell if he should read 
 Du Halde's account of China, he said, " Why, yes, 
 as one reads such books — that is to say, consult it." 
 Of many large volumes the index is the best portion 
 and the usefullest. A glance through the casement 
 gives whatever knowledge of the interior is needful. 
 An epitome is only a book shortened ; and, as a 
 general rule, the worth increases as the size lessens. 
 There is truth in Young's comparison of elaborate 
 compilations to the iron money of Lycurgus, of 
 which the weight was so enormous, and the value 
 so trifling, that a yoke of oxen only drew five 
 hundreds pound sterling. The lives of nations, as 
 of individuals, concentrate their lustre and interest 
 in a few passages. Certain episodes must be 
 selected ; such as the ages of Pericles and Augus- 
 tus, Elizabeth and Leo, Louis XIV. and Charles V. 
 Sometimes a particular chapter embraces the won- 
 ders of a century ; as the Feudal System, the dawn 
 of Discovery, and the Printing Press. The frag- 
 ments should be bound together by a connecting line 
 of knowledge, however slender, encircling the whole 
 fields of inquiries. The regal, the ecclesiastical, 
 and the commercial elements are to be combined. 
 The visitor must not spend his leisure in the Coli- 
 seum, to the exclusion of St. Peter's; nor think 
 himself familiar with London, unless he goes to the 
 Exchange. 
 
 (3.) The third aspect of History is the moral, as 
 it cherishes the feelings of virtue, and enlarges their 
 action. Southey felt confident that Clarendon, put 
 
120 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 into his youthful hands, would have preserved him 
 from the political follies which he lived to regret and 
 outgrow. Guicciardini, also, has some claim to his 
 reputation of communicating high thoughts to his 
 readers ; but the assertion that historians, in general, 
 have been the true friends of virtue, will be rejected 
 by all except the ciedulous, or the indifferent. 
 
 We have only one national record of which the 
 single design is to elevate and direct the mind. 
 Jewish History is God's Illuminated Clock set in 
 the dark steeple of Time. It is man's world which 
 common narrative describes. Actions are weighed 
 in man's scales. The magnitude of a deed deter- 
 mines its character. Paul Jones is a pirate; Na- 
 poleon is a conqueror. One assassination is a 
 murder ; ten thousand deaths are glory. Yet it is 
 supposable that, in the eyes of angels, a struggle 
 down a dark lane and a battle of Leipsic differ in 
 nothing but excess of wickedness. 
 
 History is a moral teacher, however, in despite of 
 its ministers. When Poussin gathered a handful of 
 dust from the ground, and declared it to be ancient 
 Rome, he was abridging philosophy in an epitaph. 
 Tyre, burned by Alexander, and sacked by the 
 Mamelukes, is a homily on fortune. 
 
 " What does not Fate ? The tower that long had stood 
 The crashing thunder and the warring winds, 
 Shook by the sure but slow destroyer Time, 
 Now hangs in doubtful ruin o'er its base, 
 And flinty pyramids and walls of brass 
 Descend. The Babylonian spires are sunk j 
 Achaia, Rome, and Egypt, moulder down. 
 Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, 
 And tottering empires sink with their own weight." 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 121 
 
 There is a sound of solemn sadness in the saying, 
 that the glory of man is but as the flower of grass — 
 a more perishable thing than the grass itself, more 
 alluring to the eye, but exposed to fiercer enemies, 
 and to the swifter ruin of the scythe. They are 
 gone — the tyrants of ancient dynasties, with their 
 splendour and cruelty — and have bequeathed to their 
 successors the warning voice of the Prophet, 
 " Where will ye leave your glory?" Think of the 
 question having been asked of Sesostris, or Bel- 
 shazzar ! But so it comes to pass. Their mag- 
 nificence is taken off, like robes and crowns when a 
 ^coronation is over. The great Conqueror strikes 
 his sword into life, and a gulf yawns between Caesar 
 and his legions. The glory remains on this side of 
 the chasm. The light of an empire dies out, like 
 embers on a cottager's hearth. All the flashing 
 shields of Persia, with the silver throne of Xerxes 
 in the midst, could not cast one ray into the shadows. 
 How is the king to summon his guard ? What 
 bridge may swing across the darkness between 
 Eternity and Time ? 
 
 But History teaches another lesson from the 
 grandeur of olden Monarchs, before the moth fretted 
 their purple. It was not alone the crumpled rose- 
 leaf that tortured their enervated senses. Fears, 
 mysterious and spectral, continually rose up with 
 menacing aspect. Oriental annals are funeral ser- 
 mons. Southey has painted, with a truthful sub- 
 limity, the feelings of Mahommedan sovereigns, — 
 mourners in .magnificent festivals, wretched in the 
 sunshine and smiles of Beauty, and ever listening, in 
 
122 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 the golden palace, for the Destroyer's trumpet at 
 the gate. The apprehension haunted them in youth, 
 and overwhelmed them with a horrible dread in age. 
 A vision in the night, a strain of music, a strange 
 face in needlework, startled them into tears. 
 " Haroun al Raschid opened a volume of poems, 
 and read, c Where are the kings, and where are the 
 rest of the world ? They are gone the way which 
 thou shalt go. O thou who choosest a perishable 
 world, and callest him happy whom it glorifies, take 
 what the world can give thee, but Death is at the 
 end ! ' And at these words, he who had murdered 
 Yahia and the Barmecides wept." 
 
 Whatever chapter of History we may open, some 
 text of alarm is certain to strike our eye. Europe 
 shares the terrors of Asia. In the noble words of 
 Raleigh, " Death, which hateth and destroyeth a 
 man, is believed ; God, which hath made him and 
 loves him, is always deferred." But Conscience, 
 chilled by the stealing shadow, tosses on its bed. 
 Charles the Fifth unclutches Navarre j and the re- 
 membered blood of martyrs drops heavily — the 
 warning of the storm — upon the pillow of Francis. 
 
 XXI. — The Flowers of History — Biography. 
 
 History is a great painter, with the world for can- 
 vas, and life for a figure. It exhibits Man in his 
 pride, and Nature in her magnificence : — Jerusalem 
 bleeding under the Roman, or Lisbon vanishing in 
 flame and earthquake. History must be splendid. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 123 
 
 Bacon called it the pomp of business. Its march is 
 in high places, and along the pinnacles and points of 
 great affairs. The extent and brilliancy of the pic- 
 ture render the execution difficult and unsatisfactory. 
 The historian cannot isolate a hero, or a saint. The 
 contagion of some infamous example infects his nar- 
 rative. The impudent stare of a Castlemaine 
 confronts a Barrow. Sir Thomas Browne had this 
 inconvenience in his thoughts when he complained 
 that History sets down things which ought never to 
 have been done, or never to have been known, and 
 suggested the advantage of choosing noble patterns 
 from among different nations, Such a choice makes 
 Biography — of which Fuller has sketched a happy 
 outline, declaring its proper aim and task to con- 
 sist in, (1) gaining some glory to God; (2) pre- 
 serving the memory of the dead ; (3) holding forth 
 examples to the living ; (4) and furnishing entertain- 
 ment to the reader. 
 
 The last quality gives to Biography the most 
 attractive shape of instruction. The voyage and the 
 journey of life are related with every variety of acci- 
 dents, shipwrecks, and escapes. Biography is the 
 home-aspect of History, as it gives the history of 
 manners. It is Washington in his corn-fields at 
 Mount Vernon ; or Pitt sowing the fragmentary 
 opera-hat in the garden. " For my own part," is 
 the confession of Dryden, referring to History, in 
 which he included Biography, " who must confess 
 it to my shame, that I never read anything but for 
 pleasure, it has always been the most delightful en- 
 tertainment of my life." The same passion was 
 
124 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 pleasantly manifested in the Danish poet, Oehlen- 
 schlager, who, when a boy, and leading his father's 
 choir at church, listened eagerly to the lessons of the 
 day, but disappeared behind the organ at the first 
 hint of the divided sermon. 
 
 Plutarch, by the general consent of Criticism, is 
 the representative of popular Biography. He has 
 three of Fuller's distinctive notes very largely deve- 
 loped ; nor, according to his measure of knowledge 
 and light, is he wanting in the religious element. 
 An ingenious rhymer of a former day asserts his 
 claim to our admiration and regard : — 
 
 " O blest B'ography ! thy charms of yore 
 Historic Truth to strong affection bore ; 
 And fostering Virtue gave thee, as thy dower, 
 Of both thy parents the attractive power 
 To win the heart, the wavering thought to fix, 
 And fond delight with wise instruction mix. 
 First of thy votaries, peerless and alone, 
 Thy Plutarch shines, by moral beauty known; 
 Enchanting Sage ! whose living lessons teach 
 What heights of Virtue human efforts reach." 
 
 Plutarch stands between the Historian, the Poet, 
 and the Romancer, and catches the beautiful lights 
 of all. His account of Theseus resembles a legend 
 from an old chronicle, or a chapter of magic. He 
 indicates his theory of composition at the beginning 
 of " Alexander," where he observes that the virtues 
 or the vices of men are not always seen best in their 
 most distinguished, or notorious exploits ; but that 
 oftentimes an indifferent action, a short saying, or a 
 ready jest, opens more intricacies of the true charac- 
 ter than a siege, or a battle. He supports his argu- 
 ment by the practice of Painters, who bestow their 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 25 
 
 chief labour on the face and eyes of the sitter, and 
 run over other parts of the picture with a hastier 
 brush. In like manner the Biographer, whose book 
 is a portrait, is recommended to copy with diligence 
 the features of the mind, and that changeful expres- 
 sion which may be learned from its eyes. The 
 detail and circumstances of a scholar's industry, or a 
 politician's plot, he can touch in a broad outline, or 
 leave to historical inquirers. 
 
 Plutarch's Lives lecall Titian's portraits. He 
 shows the face of a hero, or a philosopher, in the 
 roughness, the glow, and the shadows of thought 
 and motion. His individuality is never hard. He 
 causes the representation of character to help the 
 attainment of a general and striking effect. His 
 memoirs are the Picturesque of Biography. Read- 
 ing becomes sight as some vivid touch animates and 
 fixes the scene. Caesar in the Senate house, sur- 
 rounded by conspirators, and turning his face in 
 every direction, meets only the gleam of steal. Pyr- 
 rhus, wounded and faint, suddenly opens his eyes on 
 Zopyrus, in the act of waving a sword over his neck, 
 and darts at him so fierce a look, that he springs 
 back in terror, and his hands tremble. On another 
 occasion, the white charger of Sylla, lashed by a 
 servant who saw his danger, carries the rider with a 
 plunge between two falling spears. 
 
 The slight circumstances of Plutarch are not mere 
 anecdotes, inserted for the sake of amusement. They 
 are traits of feeling and disposition ; short lines from 
 a page of the heart put into italics. Homer is not 
 more pleasantly natural. He tells us of his little girl, 
 
126 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 and her anxiety that her dolls might share in the at- 
 tentions of the nurse. One stroke of the pen iden- 
 tifies Agesilaus. Returning from the victory of 
 Chaeronea, he makes no alteration in his furniture, 
 or establishment, and wishes his daughter to be con- 
 tented with her plain wooden carriage. We have 
 all the wilfulness of Cleopatra epitomized when, to 
 avoid discovery, she rolls herself in a carpet, and 
 being carefully tied up at full length, is delivered in 
 the dusk of the evening, like a large parcel, at the 
 palace of Caesar. 
 
 Occasionally he introduces little views of fields 
 and gardens, which are extremely agreeable. When 
 Lucullus, abandoning his Parthian expedition, 
 marched in the middle of summer against Tigranes, 
 and had gained the summit of Mount Taurus, he 
 saw with wonder that the corn was still green. At 
 a later season, his soldiers were wetted every day 
 in the narrow woody roads, by snow that fell on 
 them from the trees. 
 
 The charm of Plutarch has allured many imita- 
 tors. In modern times, Vasari breathed into the 
 histories of painters and men of art the engaging 
 simplicity and freshness of the Greek. We seem to 
 listen to the Masters whom he describes, and find 
 the exclamation of Lanzi upon our tongue : — It was 
 thus that RafFaelle and Andrea taught their scholars, 
 and the sharp, quick sentence flashed from the lips 
 of Buonarotti. It is true that the reputation of 
 Vasari has been built up by scholarly hands. He 
 enjoyed the aid which Reynolds was accused of con- 
 cealing, and had his Johnson in a Camalduline monk. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 27 
 
 Hume wished Robertson to adopt this familiar 
 kind of history, and make Plutarch his model for a 
 series of modern lives. Avoiding disquisition, the 
 characters of celebrated persons were to be illus- 
 trated by domestic anecdotes, striking observations, 
 and a general sketch of their employments. Hume 
 also turned the eye of his friend upon the little 
 groups of inferior actors, with faces more or less 
 known, whom, in his happy phrase, we meet in 
 the corners of history. 
 
 The proposal was ingenious, as it showed the 
 way to fill a gallery with portraits of discoverers, 
 statesmen, painters, and men of letters. The annals 
 of an age would be combined in a single view, while 
 the reader, standing in the open field of universal 
 history, and overlooking the barren places, might 
 gather all the flowers, and make everything good 
 and pleasant his own. 
 
 The least interesting form of Biography is the Po- 
 litical. A life of Walpole is a prolonged record of 
 the wrangling of Party. Who cares for Harley, 
 except as the friend of Pope ? The lives of soldiers 
 are scarcely more satisfactory. The incidents are 
 sorrows ; and only in rare cases, as in the British 
 struggle with Napoleon, is the sympathy of the 
 reader justly awakened. A thousand dreary chap- 
 ters of ambition and blood must be waded over, be- 
 fore the leaf opens upon Waterloo or Corunna. The 
 sea is fruitfuller of instruction ; and Nelson and 
 Collingwood supply manuals of patriotism and af- 
 fection. The hardships of the sailor bring out 
 another instance of Johnson's waywardness. Cook's 
 
128 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 voyages had just appeared, and pointing to them, he 
 exclaimed, — " A man had better work his way be- 
 fore the mast, than read these through. There 
 can be no entertainment in such books." Yet a 
 voyage, which is only a life upon water, seems to 
 possess that variety of daring and escape which com- 
 mon lives want. Its reality is romance. The suf- 
 ferings of Anson live with the faery tale of child- 
 hood, and the battered ship still drops to anchor 
 with its ghastly crew, before the green and happy 
 island. The story of La Perouse is a scene of 
 tragedy that touches other hearts, besides that of the 
 poet who said, — 
 
 " His pages had a zest 
 More sweet than fiction to my wondering breast, 
 When, rapt in fancy, many a boyish day 
 I tracked his wanderings o'er the watery way. 
 He came not back — Conjecture's cheek grew pale, 
 Year after year in no propitious gale, 
 His lilied banner held its homeward way, 
 And Science saddened at her Martyr's stay." 
 
 
 Biography, exclusively serious, or devotional, 
 contains many elements of beauty. The seques- 
 tered teacher, the zealous missionary, and the 
 glorified martyr, have characteristic features of 
 sublimity and tenderness. How curious is our 
 sensation in closing an account of Marlborough, or 
 Richelieu, and taking up the gentle portraitures of 
 "Walton. It is like being suddenly carried from the 
 Thames, between London and Greenwich, rocking 
 its stately ships, and lined by busy wharfs, into the 
 pastoral Wye, with its green farms, and the solemn 
 ruins of God's House. Compare a splendid saloon 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 120, 
 
 in Paris with the holy scene in the old palace of 
 Salisbury, where we behold — 
 
 "The trusty staff that Jewel gave 
 To youthful Hooker, in familiar style 
 The gift exalting, and with playful smile." 
 
 The Panegyric once spoken of a departed saint is 
 true of every other ; and if an age be evil and de- 
 serve him not, it is the more needful to have such 
 lives preserved in memory, to instruct our piety, or 
 upbraid our sins. And so, after the tree of Paradise 
 has been cut down, the dead trunk may help to up- 
 hold the falling temple, or kindle a fire upon the 
 altar. 
 
 The history of men of science has one peculiar 
 advantage, as it shows the importance of little things 
 in producing great results. Smeaton learned his 
 principle of constructing a lighthouse, by noticing 
 the trunk of a tree to be diminished from a curve to a 
 cylinder. Rembrandt's marvellous system 01 splen- 
 dour and shade was suggested by accidental gleams 
 of light in his father's mill. White of Selborne, 
 carrying about in his rides and walks a list or birds 
 to be investigated ; and Newton, turning an old box 
 into a water-clock, or the yard of a house into a sun- 
 dial, are examples of those habits of patient observa- 
 tion which scientific biography attractively recom- 
 mends. 
 
 But the annals of pure literature afford the highest 
 gratification, whether the subject be a poet, a philo- 
 sopher, or that refined inquirer after beauty and 
 wisdom who passes under the universal name of 
 scholar. It was the belief of Johnson that no lite- 
 
 K 
 
130 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 rary life in England had been well written. The 
 gorgeous tale of genius is always left half told. 
 Time, which destroys its memorials, enlarges its 
 lustre. It is only since biography and letters became 
 convertible into gold, that the contemporaries of 
 famous men preserve and publish the sayings of the 
 departed. How we might have rejoiced if Occleve, 
 instead of prefixing to a manuscript a portrait of 
 Chaucer, had given a few recollections of the poet him- 
 self, and fragments of his table-talk about the Pilgrim- 
 age to Canterbury ; or if Ben Jonson, who survived 
 Shakspere twenty-one years, had presented to the 
 world a short review of his friend's festive evenings ! 
 But the age made no sign when its noblest son 
 passed away. The birth, the marriage, the author- 
 ship, and the retirement of Shakspere compose his 
 biography. If we seek for news of prejudices, in- 
 firmities, charity, and love, it is found in his verses 
 alone. Deep is the sigh of taste for lost treasures, 
 whether it muses upon the sweet, serious conver- 
 sation of Spenser, the gilded current of Hooker's 
 sequestered thoughtfulness, the variegated wisdom 
 of Milton, the magnificent explorings of Bacon, or 
 the paradisiacal dreams of Taylor. Few footprints 
 remain on the sand before the ever-flowing tide. 
 Long ago it washed out Homer's. Curiosity follows 
 him in vain. Greece and Asia perplex us with a 
 rival Stratford-upon-Avon. The rank of Aristo- 
 phanes is only conjectured from his gift to two poor 
 players of Athens. Of every country and season the 
 complaint is felt and uttered. Precious would be 
 the journal by a Florentine De Foe of the indoor 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I3I 
 
 occupations of Dante. Think of beholding, as in a 
 clear glass, Macchiavelli living along the lines of his 
 political web ; Galileo watching the moon plough 
 her way across the clouds ; or Tasso, with Polybius 
 in his hand, marshalling the knights of Godfrey. 
 
 The most delightful life is that which a loving 
 friend or admirer composes from his own recollec- 
 tions. Boswell's Johnson is the model and the 
 master-piece. In a humbler way, Roger North's 
 account of the Lord-keeper Guildford and his two 
 brothers is admirable for its dramatic truth and cha- 
 racter. Of one of these, a Turkish merchant, who 
 returned to England in the reign of Charles the 
 Second, he has left a sketch so lively and particular, 
 that we seem to have lived in the same house. We 
 accompany him to Bridewell, and mark his trepida- 
 tion at the turnkey with the gruff voice, who recalled 
 the alarming "Chiaus" of Constantinople ; we hold 
 our breath at his daring adventure in the tower of 
 Bow Church, when he swung his corpulent body 
 round the column ; or take his arm to St. Paul's, on 
 Saturdays, when Sir Christopher Wren was there, 
 to have " a snatch of discourse" about the building. 
 
 The account of Wolsey by Cavendish has the 
 same truthfulness and reality. It is a picture-book 
 done by the pen. What a breathing, moving pano- 
 rama is the Cardinal's day ! The tv/o " masses" 
 being over, he comes from his chamber about e'ght 
 of the clock, all in red, with an upper garment of 
 taffety, or most commonly of fine crimson satin 
 engrained ; his tippet of sables is round his neck, and 
 in his hand he carries the mysterious orange, full of 
 
132 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 aromatic sponge, and anxiously held to the nose 
 when the throng presses him, or a suitor grows trou- 
 blesome. Not a feature of the procession is lost. 
 We see the princely " hat" borne by a gentleman 
 of worship " right solemnly," words which have a 
 sound of the Vatican ; his mule with scarlet pillion 
 and gilt stirrups ; his cross-bearers on great horses ; 
 his train of noblemen and chivalry; and his four foot- 
 men, bearing burnished pole-axes that catch the sun. 
 And so the king's favourite rides to the door of 
 Westminster Hall. No limner, in the monastic 
 shade, hung more fondly over his illuminated saint, 
 than the gentleman-usher of Wolsey upon the linea- 
 ments of his Cardinal. 
 
 Whether much or little be known, no secrets 
 should be kept. Biography is useless which is hot 
 true. The weaknesses of character must be pre- 
 served, however insignificant or humbling. The 
 jest-book of Tacitus, the medicated drinks of Bacon, 
 the extempore rhymes of Cheselden, the preparatory 
 violin of Bourdaloue, and the fancy-lighting damsons 
 of Dryden, have their place and value. They are 
 the errata of genius, and clear up the text. A 
 French mathematician had pleasant doubts concern- 
 ing the animal wants of Newton, and was disposed 
 to regard him as an intellectual being, in whom the 
 mind's flame had absorbed each grosser particle. It 
 is a precipitous fall from dividing a ray of light, or 
 writing Comus^ to weariness and dinner. But Bio- 
 graphy admonishes pride, when it displays Salmasius, 
 the champion of kings, shivering under the eye and 
 scourge of his wife -, or bids us stand at the door of 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I33 
 
 Milton's academy, and hear the scream and the 
 ferule upstairs. It steals on the Poet and the Pre- 
 mier in their undress : — Cowley in dressing-gown 
 and slippers, and Cecil with his Treasurer's robe on 
 the chair. 
 
 The works of an author are not always evidence 
 for the biographer, because talent has a professional 
 temper which it manifests in type, or colours. 
 Watteau was only gay in a landscape, and Young 
 was cheerful without his pen. A delicate judgment 
 distinguishes the natural from the artistic frame of 
 thought. But in numberless instances the book or 
 the picture is a commentary on the mind that pro- 
 duced it, and corrects a false opinion of character 
 and endowments. Walton imagined Hooker to have 
 been simple and childlike in worldly affairs ; whereas 
 the Polity shows an acute observer of mankind, and 
 a vein of strong and quiet humour flowing through 
 the learned argument. 
 
 When a man relates his own life, we call it an 
 Autobiography. These portraits may be captivating, 
 but can seldom be trusted. The composer uncon- 
 sciously, or by design, modifies and softens a harsh 
 feature, or an unpleasing expression. His ideal of 
 excellence answers the purpose of a painter's lay- 
 figure. He disposes and dresses it in favourable 
 lights and rich draperies. A deformed mind is 
 muffled in cloth of gold. Such a person resembles 
 Prior giving his picture to St. John's in a brocaded 
 suit. A vice, or a bad custom, strongly marked and 
 decided, is shaded off into a neutral tint. How 
 amusing is Clarendon's vindication of his appetite, 
 
134 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 when, speaking in the third person, he says : — " He 
 indulged his palate very much, and even took some 
 delight in eating and drinking, but without any 
 approach to luxury " In Brown's singular piece of 
 mind-painting, the same self-delusion is conspicuous, 
 and throws a doubtfulness over the whole. It is the 
 physician's likeness drawn by himself, and presented 
 to posterity. The mightier the writer, the more his 
 tale will be suspected. It was hinted by Caesar's 
 enemies that his Commentaries, which are a chapter 
 of autobiography, would have been longer if he had 
 inserted his defeats. 
 
 Notwithstanding its defects, personal narrative is 
 always entertaining. No style admits so many 
 trifles ; moreover, autobiographers are generally on 
 good terms with themselves, and amuse us, in spite 
 of our contempt. To this class belongs Colley 
 Cibber's Apology, which is the elaborate miniature 
 of a Gossip. Cellini's mood is higher and darker. 
 He opens his mind to the public gaze, and records 
 with imperturbable tranquillity the symptoms of its 
 disease and its health. We see him in every pos- 
 ture of debasement ; abandoned and superstitious ; 
 a scorner of the ignorant, and a believer in magic ; 
 passing, by one step, from a brutal insult to a reli- 
 gious sonnet, and fighting a duel with his eye upon 
 Providence. 
 
 The scholar's story is told by Huet, Bishop of 
 Avranches. The order never had an abler repre- 
 sentative. Of noble descent, he lost his parents in 
 childhood, and fought his way to learning through all 
 the ingenuity of persecution. His schoolfellows 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 35 
 
 stole his books, tore his papers, or wetted them until 
 the ink ran. During play-time they barred up his 
 door ; to enjoy a quiet hour of study he rose with the 
 sun, while his tormentors were asleep, or hid himself 
 in the thick shade of the wood. But his efforts 
 were unsuccessful. His companions hunted the 
 student among the bushes, and drove him from his 
 concealment. At length he became his own master, 
 and the hill of knowledge and fame was rapidly 
 climbed. From the age of twenty almost up to 
 ninety years, he pursued his studies with a vigour 
 that no labour could subdue. Languor was unknown 
 to his iron nerves. After six or seven hours spent 
 in mental toil, he cheerfully closed his books, 
 singing to himself, and ready and eager for a new 
 encounter. 
 
 We owe these lighter touches of self-portraiture 
 to the form of composition which Huet selected. A 
 grave historian would have hesitated to relate the 
 prodigies of fencing, jumping, and muscular strength, 
 which he appears to have esteemed, as Johnson 
 exulted in his " seat " after hounds. But as the 
 individual record of perseverance and learning, the 
 autobiography of Huet is invaluable. What age will 
 behold another scholar to whom astronomy and 
 Greek were equally easy ? who dissected with his 
 own hand three hundred eyes, and edited the Delphin 
 Classics ? 
 
 Occasionally a true poet weaves into his verse 
 the experiences and the delights of his early or later 
 life. Few threads give more beauty to the web. 
 The first canto of the Minstrel is an interesting ex- 
 
I36 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 ample, showing how the heart of Beattie throbs in 
 the breast of Edwin j while the grassy turf, 
 
 u With here and there a violet bestrown," 
 
 the woody glen, the murmuring brook, the boughs 
 rustled by the owl, the breezy down, and the misty 
 hill clearing before the sun — are only so many re- 
 flections of Lawrencekirk, and the lonely hamlet of 
 Ferdoun. Collins resembles Beattie. Each ode is 
 an episode of his own inner life displayed in colours. 
 When the poet speaks without concealment in his 
 own person, the biographical surprise is still more 
 grateful. Cowper illustrates the reality, as Beattie 
 shows the allegory. Who does not love his remem- 
 bered walk, 
 
 " Ankle-deep in moss and flowery thyme'*? 
 
 or the confession of his impatience, in the winter 
 evenings, to open the " folio of four pages," which 
 
 "The herald of a noisy world, 
 With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks, 
 News from all nations lumbering at his back," 
 
 had just dropped at the inn-door. And Akenside 
 wrote few passages so tender and pleasing as the 
 lines, in which he throws a backward glance o5 
 pensive regret, upon the youthful hours he passed at 
 Morpeth : — 
 
 " O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook 
 The rocky pavement and the mossy fells 
 Of* solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream, 
 How gladly I recall your well-known seats, 
 Beloved of old ; and that delightful time, 
 When all alone, for many a summer's day, 
 I wandered through your calm recesses, led 
 In silence, by some powerful hand unseen." 
 
 In our own day, the poetry of Wordsworth has car- 
 ried the biographical style to its utmost boundary. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I37 
 
 Sometimes Autobiography takes the earnest tone 
 of Confessions, as in the penitential gloom of Augus- 
 tine, and the melodrama of Rousseau. Frequently 
 it flows into the short entries of the Journal ; Evelyn 
 hears an admirable sermon by Pearson ; and Pepys 
 sheds tears for a feather or a doublet. Letters are 
 acknowledged memoirs of Self. Horace Walpole's 
 correspondence inlays his own mind in mosaic. 
 The epistolary style is always artificial. The open- 
 ing of the heart to a friend is one of the fables of the 
 golden age. Even Cowper had a tinge for his cousin. 
 What a despiser of verses was Pope by the Post ! 
 But the frozen housekeeper of Lord Oxford would 
 have told a different story when, in one winter night 
 of the terrible "Forty," she answered the impatient 
 poet's fourth bell for a sheet of paper. 
 
 From the lessons of Biography four may be 
 chosen, (i.) It suggests a comparison between the 
 difficulties of earlier and later readers : — 
 
 "On shelf of deal, beside the cuckoo-clock, 
 Of cottage-reading rests the chosen stock," 
 
 which might have bewildered by its luxury a divine 
 of 1300. The Greek sage had few aids. Plato de- 
 voted three hundred pounds to the purchase of three 
 books of a distinguished Pythagorean ; and Aristotle 
 invested twice that sum in the small library of a de- 
 ceased philosopher. Jerome nearly ruined himself 
 to procure the works of Origen ; and Leo bartered 
 five hundred pieces of gold for five books of Tacitus*. 
 The biographer may moralise on the pen he holds. 
 Petrarch being at Liege, in the earlier half of the 
 fourteenth century, and anxious to copy two speeches 
 
I38 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 of Cicero, with difficulty obtained a few drops of 
 ink as yellow as saffron. 
 
 (2.) Biography cheers merit when its hopes are 
 drooping, It leads the student down a gallery of 
 portraits, and gives the comforting or warning 
 history of each. It shows Jackson working on his 
 father's shop-board, and cherishing a love for Art by 
 a visit to Castle Howard ; Richardson, a printer's 
 apprentice, stealing an hour from sleep to improve 
 his mind, and scrupulously buying his own candle, 
 that his master might not be defrauded ; or the 
 Chinese scholar Morrison, labouring at his trade of 
 a last and boot maker, and keeping his lamp from 
 blowing out with a volume of Matthew Henry's 
 Commentary. 
 
 Occasionally one incident in the life of a re- 
 markable person contains the most profitable instruc- 
 tion. Prior, on the death of his father, was sent to 
 Westminster School, which he left to assist his uncle, 
 a vintner at Charing-cross. He remembered Busby, 
 and made Horace the companion of his leisure. The 
 Latin poet was to be the key of his fortunes. The 
 Rummer Tavern was the Club of the Nobility, and 
 numbered among its visitors the celebrated Lord 
 Dorset, to whom Dryden addressed his Essay on 
 dramatic poetry, and who, before he grew fat and 
 nervous, was the gayest converser of that sparkling 
 age. Upon one occasion he found the vintner's 
 nephew reading Horace. A different version of the 
 story is given, but with the same result. He ex- 
 pressed his interest in the young man's welfare, and 
 undertook the care of his education. Cambridge air 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 39 
 
 ripened his powers. He rose to political renown, 
 maintained at Versailles his reputation for wit, and 
 returning to England drew from Swift the announce- 
 ment, " Prior is come home from France for a few 
 days ; Stocks rise at his coming" 
 
 (3.) Biography turns our eyes from the present 
 to the future. In life, Gorgias may be more ap- 
 plauded than Plato, and Salieri snatch the reward 
 from Mozart. Years bring the change and the re- 
 compense. The statue follows the hemlock of 
 Phocion ; and the chair of Boccaccio is raised over 
 the ashes of Dante. A picture, for which Wilkie, 
 in his early London life, received fifteen guineas, 
 was recently sold for eight hundred. Biography is 
 the application of History to the heart, and its chiefest 
 fruit is patience. He who strives to make himself 
 different from other men by much reading is justly 
 said to gain this advantage, that in ill fortune he has 
 something left of entertainment and comfort. 
 
 (4.) The grandest lesson of Biography is the need 
 of moral and religious principle. This is the burden 
 of all its music. Stop for a moment before that 
 youthful face, which shoots such a fitful and dazz- 
 ling brightness from its proud, visionary eyes. It is 
 the portrait of Chatterton. Begin with his childhood. 
 At six years of age he did not know A \ he spent 
 the same number of months in reaching P. Prior's 
 plan of alluring the scholar with gingerbread letters, 
 to be eaten as they are learned, might have failed. 
 Suddenly a spark dropped on the cold mind. His 
 mother tore up an old music-book for waste paper, 
 and the painted capitals caught his eye. She said 
 
140 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 that he fell in love with the manuscript. A black- 
 letter Bible completed the conquest of the dunce. 
 He awoke like a giant, morning, noon, and evening, 
 devouring books with unsatisfied hunger. 
 
 His temptation grew with his intellect. A manu- 
 facturer requested him to choose a device, or inscrip- 
 tion, for a cup. " Paint me," answered the boy, 
 "an angel with wings and a tiumpet, to trumpet my 
 name over the world." It was Milton's daring 
 without his prayer. The tempter of Chatterton 
 was pride. One of his latest letters is still preserved, 
 in which the terrible working of an ungoverned 
 spirit is shown by the emphasis of his pen. " It is 
 my Pride, my native, unconquerable pride, that 
 plunges me into distraction. You must know that 
 nineteen-twentieths of my composition is Pride. I 
 must either live a slave, or a servant — to have no 
 will of my own, no sentiments of my own, which I 
 may freely declare as such — or Die." 
 
 To feed this pride he robbed his neighbours. It 
 is quite conceivable that a boy-genius, overflowing 
 with mirthful strength, might banter a pompous 
 pewterer by a Norman pedigree, or a dull topo- 
 grapher with a castle in the clouds. But Chatter- ; 
 ton's aim was money. His literary frauds were the \ 
 rudimental efforts of a forger. The pride that | 
 enslaved his soul at Bristol, drove him to London. 
 Its bondage became fiercer. One after another his 
 home-thoughts and recollections are whirled away, 
 like spring blossoms in a hurricane. The black- 
 letter Bible is lost in shadow. Mother, and sisters, 
 the gifts of love, and the lights of ambition, disap- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 141 
 
 pear. Only Pride remains. He retires to his dreary- 
 chamber ; collects his fragments of verse and prose ; 
 tears them in pieces ; mingles the poison ; swallows 
 it, and plunges over the ghastly precipice in sullen, 
 tempestuous, magnificent despair. 
 
 O words to be written in gold ! — 
 
 " Woe be to the youthful poet who sets out upon 
 his pilgrimage to the Temple of Fame, with nothing 
 but hope for his viaticum ! There is the Slough of 
 Despond, and the Hill of Difficulty, and the Valley 
 of the Shadow of Death upon the Way." 
 
 ' XXII. — Literature of the Pulpit — its 
 Entertainment. 
 
 When Beauclerk's books were sold, Wilkes ex- 
 pressed his astonishment at finding so large a collec- 
 tion of sermons in the library of a fashionable scholar. 
 Johnson said, " Why, sir, you are to remember that 
 sermons make a considerable branch of English 
 literature." The caution might be widely spread. 
 In every Christian land the learned mind has poured 
 its choicest gifts into Theology. Chrysostom warms 
 the fourth century like a sun. The discourses of 
 St. Bernard are shining lights in dark ages. Dante^ 
 whom he preceded by more than a hundred years, 
 caught no views of Paradise from the mountain-top 
 so fruitful and serene. If we turn our eyes to 
 France, Bossuet is her grandest poet, and Pascal 
 eclipses Montesquieu. 
 The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is 
 
142 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 like a harbour, into which a far-travelling Curiosity 
 has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor. The 
 ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise. 
 Odours of distant countries and times steal from the 
 red leaves, the swelling ridges of vellum, and the 
 titles in tarnished gold. Davenant's description of 
 their covers sprinkled with dust, and long streets of 
 spiders' webs, is striking as the lesson it gives is 
 significant. 
 
 These are the controversies and the speculations of 
 the schoolmen, and would scarcely be found on the 
 shelves of Beauclerk. But the elder rhetoric, which 
 had taken the shape of exhortation, abounds in 
 elements of interest and materials of deep or elegant 
 thinking, which the polite reader may separate from 
 the text. Each volume is a common-place book of 
 brilliant sayings and erudite allusions; a treasure- 
 house of products and antiquities from every climate 
 and age of intellect. Here are gathered, without 
 much attempt at order or classification, battered 
 armour of Homeric chiefs, dry chips of Seneca, 
 poisoned arrows of Juvenal, magical flutes of 
 Apuleius, grotesque words coined by that great 
 minter, Tertullian, and spiritual clothing of wrought 
 gold from Chrysostom. He who seeks for amuse- 
 ment can find it. The slightest circumstances of 
 ancient and modern life are preserved ; — from the 
 vermilion cord with which the public officer 
 pursued and marked the Athenians who neglected 
 the Assemblies, to the first appearance of the 
 umbrella in London. 
 
 The preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I43 
 
 centuries are its familiar historians. Latimer opens 
 the royal kitchen. Andrews leads common life into 
 the sun. We learn from Donne how street-begging 
 had become a trade in 1625. Parents educated 
 their children in it, and expert professors of the art 
 received apprentices, whom they perfected in making 
 a face and a story. Perhaps the English preacher 
 caught this habit of sketching manners from Chrysos- 
 tom 5 in whose Homilies we obtain so many lively 
 views of Constantinople and Antioch ; who, in 
 enforcing the study of the Scriptures, dissuades 
 parents from hanging the Gospels round the neck of 
 a child, or near the bed, as a charm ; and condemns 
 the rich for using dice every day, and keeping their 
 sumptuous Bibles shut up in the cases. 
 
 During two hundred years, the sermon shaped 
 and nourished the English mind. Greek and Latin 
 fountains of philosophy and grace flowed into Poetry 
 from the Pulpit. Shakspere might have picked up 
 crumbs of Plato and Euripides from the orator of 
 Paul's Cross. The preacher had a religious and an 
 instructive character. He entertained that he might 
 improve the hearer. He unfolded the grandeur of a 
 Prophecy, or the comfort of an Epistle, and alarmed 
 the conscience, or bound up a wounded heart ; he 
 brought tidings of foreign learning to the scholar, of 
 discoveries to the naturalist, and of manners to the 
 people ; and thus he won the ears of the thoughtful, 
 the inquisitive, and the idle. 
 
 The sermon reflected the research, the feelings, 
 and the experience of the speaker. The reading of 
 a week slipped into a parenthesis. If Donne sets 
 
144 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 forth the praises of devout women in the morning 
 of Christianity, he remembers a Venetian story 
 about the matrons who were sent to propitiate an 
 empress. In showing that sin separates a man from 
 God, he tells the congregation of his own visit to 
 Aix-la-Chapelle for the sake of the Baths, and how 
 the house he lodged in — big enough for a small 
 parish — was occupied by swarms of Anabaptists, 
 who agreed in nothing but keeping apart from one 
 another ; the father excommunicating the son on the 
 third floor, and the uncle his nephew in the attic. 
 
 Amusement is only the accident of our early elo- 
 quence. In devotion, learning, argument, and ima- 
 gination, it is unequalled. It comes warm from the 
 Bible. The irradiated mind shoots a glory into the 
 commonest word, and Christian duties are drawn 
 with so much patience of love and embellishment, 
 that later pens seem to produce faint and imperfect 
 copies. Mr. Keble illustrates one of his poems by 
 a passage from Miller's Bampton Lectures ; but it 
 will be seen that the comparison had been employed 
 two centuries before by Donne, and at a later period 
 by Seed. Its last appearance is in a discourse of 
 Mr. Melvill: — 
 
 THE EYE OF THE PORTRAIT. 
 
 MlLlER. 
 
 " The point worthy of obser- 
 vation is, to note how a book of 
 the description and compass which 
 we have represented Scripture to 
 be, possesses this versatility of 
 power : this eye, like that of a 
 portrait, uniformly fixed upon us, 
 turn where we will." 
 
 Donne. 
 "Be, therefore, no stranger to 
 this face j see Him here that you 
 may know Him, and He you 
 there 5 and then, as a picture looks 
 upon him who looks upon it, God, 
 upon whom thou keepest thine 
 eye, will keep his eye upon thee." 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 
 
 145 
 
 Seed. 
 " When the discourse is di- 
 rected to us, lending a favourable 
 attention, and making pertinent 
 replies ; like a fine picture which 
 seems to fix an eye upon, and 
 direct its views to each person in 
 the room, who looks upon it, and 
 eyes it attentively." 
 
 Melvill. 
 
 " Such is your nature that, 
 without constant vigilance, the di- 
 rection may be gradually changed, 
 and yet appear to you the same, 
 even as the eyes of a well-drawn 
 portrait follow you as -you move, 
 and so might persuade you that 
 you had not moved at all." 
 
 • The thought, indeed, may be found in a lightre 
 page. When Colonel Everard revisited the parlour 
 in Woodstock Lodge, where the old portrait of 
 Victor Lee was suspended, " He remembered how 
 . . . when left alone in the apartment, the search- 
 ing eye of the old warrior seemed always bent upon 
 bis, in whatever part of the room he placed himself." 
 
 Read one more example from a preacher of the 
 Elizabethan age, and of the present : — ■ 
 
 OLD CHURCHES. 
 
 Henry Smith. 
 " This is our life, while we 
 enjoy it; we lose it like the sun, 
 which flies swifter than arrow, 
 and yet no man perceives that it 
 moves. He which lasted 900 
 years could not hold out one hour 
 longer ; and what is he now more 
 than a child that lived but a year? 
 Where are they which founded 
 this goodly city? which possessed 
 these fair houses, and walked in 
 these pleasant fields 3 which en- 
 tered these stately temples ; which 
 kneeled in these seats ; which 
 preached out of this place but 
 thirty years ago ? Is not earth 
 turned to earth, and shall not our 
 sun set like theirs when the night 
 
 Bradley. 
 " Even the works of our own 
 hands remain much longer than 
 we. The pyramids of Egypt have 
 defied the attacks of 3000 years, 
 while their builders sank, perhaps, 
 under the burden of fourscore. 
 Our houses stand long after their 
 transient proprietors are gone, and 
 their names forgotten. Where is 
 now the head that planned, and 
 the hand which built this house 
 of God ? They were all reduced 
 to ashes 500 years ago. The very 
 seats we sit on have borne genera- 
 tions before they bore us, and will 
 probably bear many after us. The 
 remains of those who once occu- 
 pied the places we now fill are 
 underneath our feet." 
 
 It is not intended to accuse the moderns of wilfully 
 defrauding the ancients. The resemblances may be 
 
I46 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 unintentional. The object of the parallel is to urge 
 the diligent study of our ancestors in divinity. The 
 antique legend, which gave the sweetest song to 
 nightingales that built their nests near the tomb of 
 Orpheus, may have a moral for prose. 
 
 The elaborateness of the early style was not felt 
 to be wearisome. Hearers and readers in 1600 were 
 seldom in a hurry. But now and then rambling 
 through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, or of the 
 first and second Charles, we overtake a loitering 
 expounder, who has a large gift of tediousness, and 
 might have assisted the German professor in his 
 course of lectures upon the first chapter of Isaiah, 
 which extended over twenty years, and was left un- 
 finished. In the true Masters of theological rhetoric, 
 however, the wandering and scattered utterance had, 
 generally, intention and method. They spread out 
 their thoughts and images, as a skilful general invests 
 a strong fortress with troops j and threw reasoning 
 into a circle, to besiege a hostile argument and cut 
 off escape. Milton's definition is realized. The 
 words in " well-ordered files fall aptly into their 
 places." Similes and metaphors are rarely orna- 
 mental figures, mere combatants on a rhetorical 
 parade, with music and standards for show. They 
 carry weapons, and are ready for action. 
 
 The epoch of elegance had not arrived, and the 
 eye of taste discovers many violations of its laws ; 
 but the most objectionable fault is the mixture of 
 spiritual and worldly things ; as in continental cities 
 a shop is encrusted on a cathedral. South is a 
 notable offender. He writes a political note on a 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I47 
 
 Gospel, and couples Cromwell and Peter in a sen- 
 tence. Much of this familiarity may be traced to the 
 Miracle-play, which had left a popular impression 
 behind it. Statesmen and Prelates were scarcely 
 alive to the discord : in the first edition of the 
 Bishops' Bible the portrait of Leicester was prefixed 
 to Joshua; and, in 1574, the arms of the Primate 
 Parker replaced Burleigh as a decoration of the 
 Psalms. 
 
 In whatever light we examine it, the sermon of 
 the seventeenth century continues to be a problem 
 of literature. It flourished in ignorance and withered 
 under education. The " plain" manner came in 
 with the National school. Day by day, the jewels of 
 the Breastplate were more clouded, and the superb 
 scenery of Truth was buried deeper in snow. The 
 public mind has taken the tone of its teachers. 
 Sublimity is darkness, and the glow of the Prophet 
 is a poetical turn. Imagine Donne re-appearing in 
 the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn with one of the dis- 
 courses which he delivered to the Society of 16 18. 
 Let him exhibit, in all its fulness, that manifold style 
 which was the delight of his friends and of the 
 crowd -, — the imperial logic, the gorgeous perspec- 
 tive of imagery, the poem in a word, the melting 
 pathos, the rapturous piety, and the splendour of 
 language that flowed over the argument and adorned 
 it, iike a crimson mantle upon armour. Picture the 
 uneasy rustle of the Benchers, and the bewilderment 
 of the Verger. 
 
 Why should "sleep" and "sermon" be longer 
 accepted as synonymes by the vulgar? A judge and 
 
I48 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 a master recommended Demosthenes to the village 
 preacher. Surely, any style is better than that which 
 is plain in the complete absence of expression, and 
 simple in having no thoughts to convey. Is it 
 surprising if the dead masses slumber under such 
 appeals ? The fervour of the old eloquence is 
 needed to strike heat into the sinner. His cure is to 
 be wrought by no servile hand. Gehazi might have 
 laid Elisha's staff for ever upon the Shunammite's 
 child. The eyes open only to the Prophet's call. 
 The kindled lips of inspired Genius must breathe 
 over the benumbed soul before the colour of health 
 will return, the baptismal flame be fanned into 
 warmth, and the son of the Church be delivered to 
 his Mother. 
 
 XXIII. — Philosophy and its Delights. 
 
 It was a remark of Bacon, that knowledge resembles 
 a tree which runs straight for some time, and then 
 parts itself into branches. Of these, Philosophy is 
 one of the most verdurous, and throws the broadest 
 shadow ; whether we regard it in relation to spiritual 
 truth, and call it Divine, or to the phenomena of 
 the visible world, and distinguish it as Natural, or 
 to the feelings and powers of Men, and show its re- 
 stricted application by the title of Human, or Moral. 
 Philosophy comes into this Discourse under its 
 single aspect of lighting and adorning* the thoughts. 
 It is only Wisdom, with the girdle of Beauty, that 
 belongs to our subject. Speculative theories are 
 left in their barren splendour. Ingenious researches, 
 
ADVANTAGES^ OF LITERATURE. I49 
 
 which obtain the name of Metaphysical, offer few 
 lasting rewards. Exploring expeditions into the 
 mind generally bring back fabulous news of the in- 
 terior. The perplexed journey is made by twilight, 
 and the dim impressions of the traveller become ob- 
 scurer in their transmission. He seldom sees an 
 object with sufficient distinctness to describe it. 
 The question remains undetermined, if Ideas be 
 inborn, as one observer affirms, or fragments of 
 broken sensations, as another supposes, or fine chains 
 coiled up in the brain, as they appeared to the inquisi- 
 tive eye of a third. 
 
 The student, therefore, who is enamoured- of the 
 graces of learning, turns to authors who entertain 
 his eye and feed his fancy with the loveliest pictures 
 and the richest fruit. For this reason he is never 
 weary of reading particular passages in Plato ; such 
 as the allegory which compares the soul to a chariot 
 with winged horses and a driver, and resolves its 
 purest thoughts into remembrances of a brighter life 
 in a nobler society. He learns a solemn and almost 
 a Christian moral from the suggestion, that the soul 
 of the philosopher will recover its lost grandeur 
 the sooner, because, in a fallen and dark condition, it 
 ever tries to recollect the things which higher In- 
 telligences contemplate. An understanding, thus 
 taught and illuminated, finds its eyesight cleared and 
 strengthened. The earth on which it dwells is 
 known to be Eden under a mist ; in the common 
 flower of the hedge, in the painted clouds, and in the 
 sunshine upon grass, it reads intimations of a better 
 country, — 
 
150 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 tl Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there 
 In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams, 
 An ampler ether, a diviner air, 
 
 And fields invested with purpureal gleams." 
 
 Such a student is greatly charmed by the manner in 
 which wisdom is communicated. Gilpin compared 
 a true philosophical style to light from a north 
 window, strong but clear. The colourless depth of 
 the Greek has the transparent freshness, without 
 being cold ; often a ray of exquisite imagination 
 seems to dart through it, and leave a lustre and 
 warmth. To the latest hour of his life, Plato 
 polished and adjusted his illustrations and argument ; 
 in the significant commentary of an early critic, 
 combing and curling, and weaving and unweaving 
 his writings after a variety of fashions. 
 
 Our own literature contains many lofty and serious 
 views of the mysteries of man's nature. In these 
 the student may 
 
 " At intervals descry 
 Gleams of the glory, streaks of flowing light, 
 Openings of heaven." 
 
 Cudworth may be studied with pleasure and profit 
 for the frequent majesty of his sentiments ; Henry 
 More, for the wild strains of a tender and musical 
 fancy ; Norris, for a serious Platonism, brightened 
 by a heavenlier sunshine ; and Berkeley, for un- 
 equalled grace and harmony of manner. The sys- 
 tem of Wollaston is fearfully mutilated on one side, 
 but his moral dignity and deep sense of immortality 
 lend impression to his teaching. It is unnecessary 
 to speak of Butler, who, in the walk which he chose, 
 is as incomparable as Hooker. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 151 
 
 Philosophical studies are beset by one peril, — a 
 person easily brings himself to think that he thinks ; 
 and a smattering of science encourages conceit. He 
 is above his companions. A hieroglyphic is a spell. 
 The Gnostic dogma is Cuneiform writing to the 
 million. Moreover, the vain man is generally a 
 doubter. It is a Newton who sees himself in a 
 child on the seashore, and his discoveries in the 
 coloured shells. A little knowledge leads a mind 
 from God. Unripe thinkers use their learning to 
 authenticate their doubts ; while unbelief has its 
 own dogma*, more peremptory than the inquisitor's. 
 Patient meditation brings the scholar back to 
 humbleness. He learns that the grandest truths ap- 
 pear slowly. They are like the shapes of cloudy 
 light, floating in the uttermost loneliness of space; 
 some the naked eye discerns, others a common glass 
 brings into view. But it was the enormous Reflec- 
 tor of modern skill, in the purity of a Southern at- 
 mosphere, that gave to those masses of vapour a 
 form and a look of glory, and kindled strips of mist 
 into rays of exquisite lustre. Thus, the cloud of 
 the weak becomes the star-cluster of the strength- 
 ened sight. Many radiant bodies yet remain in their 
 majestic retirements. No glass, however endowed 
 with vision, compels these shadows to come within 
 its range, and to show their faces. Still there is 
 hope. The discovery of one star is the promise ot 
 another. The hand of Science grows more cunning 
 every day, and its eye endures a stronger blaze. 
 This is the lesson for the inquirer into the far-ofF 
 and dim things of Truth. Hour by hour some eyes 
 
152 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 are opened more and more by the Father of Lights, 
 to behold the wondrous things of His Law. 
 Nothing is too remote or misty for the straining 
 and waiting gaze. The awfullest mysteries seem 
 to be drawn nearer, and to glimmer from behind the 
 veil. 
 
 XXIV. — The Study of Languages. 
 
 Fleury, after excepting Latin, Italian, and Spanish, 
 for general readers, and Greek and Hebrew for ec- 
 clesiastics, includes foreign languages among the 
 curiosities of literature. In English he found no 
 advantage to compensate a learner for its difficulty. 
 Selden puts the relative value of ancient and modern 
 tongues with much archness, in comparing a person 
 who quotes a Dutch, when a classical author might 
 be used, to a guest leaving a party of scholars to so- 
 licit a testimonial from the kitchen. 
 
 The judgment of Fleury may fairlv be questioned, 
 but his omission of Oriental languages will not be 
 disapproved. These mines are worked at enormous 
 cost, and the returns are small. If Johnson's pen- 
 sion had come twenty years earlier, it would hardly 
 have profited mankind in sending him, according to 
 his wish, to Constantinople to learn Arabic. The 
 rarity of such acquirements imparts a fictitious im- 
 portance. We regard a person who speaks Chinese 
 fluently, as we might look at a traveller accustomed 
 to take his morning walk along the Great Wall. A 
 shadow from the Pyramids falls over Champollion. 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 153 
 
 Languages are voices of a nation's mind. The 
 mountain Greek has no tone of the soft Ionic. The 
 Anglo-Saxon casts abroad in its short, stern, and 
 solemn words, the awfulness of the forests where it 
 grew. Italian is the love-talk of the Roman with- 
 out his armour. A most curious instance of a 
 language shaped by climate is seen in the South Sea 
 Islands ; and we are told that whole chapters of the 
 New Testament in these languages contain no words 
 ending with consonants, except the proper names of 
 the original. 
 
 Of course every new language is a new instru- 
 ment of power. It was finely said by Bacon, that 
 God has formed the mind of man like a mirror, 
 capable of receiving the image of the whole world, 
 the variety of things, and the changes of time. He, 
 therefore, whose knowledge spreads into the amplest 
 circle, possesses the largest glass. Each added ac- 
 quirement is a shade melted from the surface. 
 Every fresh dialect is a new picture brought under 
 the eye. But no riches are without inconveniences. 
 Reflections of various objects overrun and confuse 
 one another. The men of many tongues corrupt 
 the idioms of their own, by catching the accent 
 of their companions. Dryden attributed most of 
 Cowley's defects to his continental associations, and 
 said that his losses at home over-balanced his gains 
 from abroad. That hideous German-English, which 
 infects our modern literature, may be thought to 
 confirm the remark. 
 
 Another apprehension rises. The time which 
 is devoted to a foreign writer must obviously be 
 
154 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 taken from a native. Some sense of sacrifice is felt 
 in abandoning the fallen angel of Milton, with his 
 face of " princely counsel," — 
 
 " Majestic though in ruins," 
 
 for the demon of Tasso, and his long tail ; Shak- 
 spere ought to be nearly got by heart, before a 
 summer afternoon is spent with Alfieri; — and the 
 theologian should enjoy very long days of study who 
 leaves Farindon upon the shelf, to muse over Seg- 
 neri. What glorious poetry and prose must Schlegel 
 have neglected, while he read with lingering eyes all 
 the forgotten verses of Boccaccio ! 
 
 The first "duty of a reader is to study the learning 
 and intellect of his own country. Our English 
 granaries will feed a long life. Bacon magnified 
 " letters, which, as ships, pass through the vast sea 
 of Time," and spread the learning and lights of one 
 age over another. And we may carry out his illus- 
 tration in the noble boast of the poet Young, that 
 Bacon himself, and Newton, and Shakspere, and 
 Milton, have showed us how all the winds cannot 
 blow a British ship further, than true Genius conveys 
 British glory. These heroic names of Wisdom and 
 Fancy go round the world, while every foreign rival 
 strikes jts flag as they pass. 
 
 Literature has pleasures like those of Travel. 
 No landscape preserves its bloom and colour out of 
 its own light and air. It looks languid and dusty in 
 a description. It must be visited to be enjoyed. 
 The remark is not inapplicable to authors. Cer- 
 tainly no translation of a true poem can retain the 
 beauty. It is a landscape transferred to the wood ; 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I55 
 
 outline, and grouping, and features may be pre- 
 served, but colour and life escape. By what process 
 of skill can the copyist present, in their full splen- 
 dour, the epithets of St. Paul, the silvery lights of 
 Livy, or the picture-words of iEschylus ? The 
 weather-stains of Dante disappear in the modern 
 fabric. The bloom of Petrarch melts under the 
 touch. The polish rubs off from Massillon and 
 Racine, and the crowded thoughtfulness of Pascal is 
 scattered. 
 
 Another obstacle may be noticed to the success 
 of the carefullest version, — a home-feeling generally 
 injures the truth of a description. I am taught by 
 the pencil-sketch or Twickenham, which Pope 
 drew in the fly-leaf of his Homer. The trim grass- 
 plot runs up to the door of Hector. The character 
 of a poem and a history suffers from the same 
 cause — the complexion and the garb are no longer 
 national. Cato addresses the senate in a wig, and 
 /Eneas, on the arm of Dryden, has the lounge of 
 the Mall. 
 
 XXV. — Domestic Interiors of Learning 
 and Taste. 
 
 The Persian poet Saadi framed a lesson in a plea- 
 sant apologue. Two friends spent a summer day 
 in a garden of roses; one contented himself with 
 the colours and fragrance, the other gathered the 
 choicest bloom, and carried it to his family. The 
 
I56 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 happy home-life of genius is the moral of the story. 
 Of many sons of learning it might be written : — 
 
 " Oh, bliss, when all in circle drawn 
 
 About him, heart and ear were fed, 
 To hear him, as he lay and read 
 The Tuscan poets on the lawn." 
 
 We overlook Richardson reading a chapter of a new 
 novel to a select circle in his grotto ; and Sterne 
 never wears so attractive an expression as by his 
 own fireside, while his daughter makes a fair manu- 
 script, and his wife is busy with her needle. " I 
 am scribbling away," he tells a friend, "at my 
 Tristram; these two volumes- are, I think, the best 
 I shall write as long as I live. My Lydia helps to 
 copy for me, and my wife knits and listens as I read 
 her chapters." 
 
 The poetic hearth of Weston, with the sofa and 
 the warm curtains, and the adventures of the traveller 
 by land or water, 
 
 " By one made vocal 
 For the amusement of the rest," 
 
 recalls the visitor who put the rose-leaves in his 
 bosom. Nor should we forget Milton inviting a 
 friend to waste a sullen day by the fire, cheered 
 by a 
 
 " Neat repast 
 Of Attic taste with wine, whence we may rise 
 To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice 
 Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air." 
 
 We breathe the Persian's rose again in Titian's 
 garden-suppers, when the soft voices and instru- 
 ments of Venetian ladies sounded from a thousand 
 gondolas, gliding past in the moonlight. 
 
 A familiar letter of Pliny opens the domestic in- 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 57 
 
 terior of a scholar seventeen hundred years ago. He 
 was stirring with the dawn, and thinking gloom 
 favourable to meditation, he had his chamber dark- 
 ened. Such opposite tempers as Malebranche, 
 Hobbes, Corneille, and Sidney, seem to have shared 
 this partiality. The morning was Pliny's season of 
 composition. Having arranged his subject, he called 
 his secretary, who wrote from his dictation, A 
 saunter on the terrace, or beneath a covered portico, 
 and a short carriage-drive, heightened his enjoyment 
 of a siesta; afterwards he took a longer walk, which 
 he improved by repeating a Greek or Latin speech. 
 Supper concluded the day with a book, music, or an 
 interlude. 
 
 We have a graceful example in a poet who bor- 
 rowed Pliny's language. Petrarch lived in the rose- 
 garden. His was the day of the true scholar, who 
 found in Vaucluse a hermitage of fancy. Often he 
 spent the hours from early morning in unbroken 
 meditation, going forth to his work of taste until the 
 evening. At other times his humour was rural, 
 and he wandered among the leafy woods, while his 
 shadow lengthened in the moonlight. Occasionally 
 he gave himself up to waking visions by the water- 
 side, to the tranquil idleness of fishing, or to the 
 culture of his orchard. A dog was his watchful 
 companion. It lay at his bedroom door, rousing him 
 by a sharp rap of the paw when he overslept himself, 
 and the day promised a cheerful excursion. The 
 moment the poet appeared, his dog led the way to 
 the familiar haunts, brisk with joy, and continually 
 turning its eyes backward. The rugged fisherman 
 
I58 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 and his withered wife, who composed Petrarch's do- 
 mestic establishment, would have received smajl 
 satisfaction from the richest rose-leaves he gathered ; 
 but to his own vivid sense of sweetness no odour 
 was lost. And doubtless he had days of solitary 
 happiness, when the Muse brought him presents, 
 not less delightful, if less real, than the Homer which 
 he received from the Byzantine ambassador, and 
 placed in rapturous admiration by the side of Plato. 
 
 It might be agreeable to look for versions of 
 Saadi's apologue in the studio of the artist ; to ob- 
 serve Rubens consecrating his daily occupations 
 with a devotional temper, surrounded by the finest 
 works of ancient genius, and nourishing his imagin- 
 ation by passages from Livy, Virgil, and Plutarch, 
 which an attendant read to him as he painted. But 
 I turn to portraits more serious and interesting. 
 Jewell rose at four o'clock to prayers, and attended 
 the public service in the cathedral at six. The re- 
 mainder of the morning he gave to study. At meal- 
 time, a chapter having been read, he amused himself 
 by listening to scholastic arguments between young 
 scholars, whom he entertained at his table. Then 
 his doors and ears were open to all causes. About 
 nine in the evening he called his servants to an ac- 
 count of the day, and admonished them accordingly : 
 " From this examination to his study (how long it 
 is uncertain, oftentimes after midnight), and so to 
 bed j wherein, after some part of an author read to 
 him by the gentleman of his bed-chamber, commend- 
 ing himself to the protection of his Saviour, he took 
 his rest." 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I59 
 
 Good Bishop Hall has furnished a sketch of his 
 own studious life in a letter to Lord Denny. No 
 trait is wanting to complete it. Like his famous 
 contemporary, he was up in summer with the bird 
 that first rises, and in winter often before the sound 
 of any bell. His waking thoughts were given to Him 
 who made the cloud for rest and the sunshine for 
 toil. While his body was being clothed, he set in 
 order the labours of the day, and entering his study 
 besought a blessing for them upon his knees. His 
 words are : — M Sometimes I put myself to school 
 to one of those ancients whom the Church hath 
 honoured with the name of Fathers ; sometimes to 
 those later doctors, who want nothing but age to 
 make them classical ; always to God's Book." The 
 season of family devotion was now come, and, this 
 duty heartily fulfilled, he returned to his private 
 reading. One while, as he tells us, his eyes were 
 busied, and then his hands, or contemplation took 
 the burden from both ; textual divinity employed 
 one hour, controversy another, history a third ; and 
 in short intervals of pensive talk with his thoughts, 
 he wound up the scattered threads of learned research 
 for future use. Thus he wore out the calm morn- 
 ing and afternoon, making music with changes. 
 
 At length a monitor interrupted him. His weak 
 body grew weary. Before and after meals he let 
 himself loose from scholarship. Then company, 
 discourse, and amusement, were welcome. These 
 prepared him for a simple repast, from which he rose 
 capable of more, though not desirous. No book 
 followed his late trencher. The discoveries and 
 
l60 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 thoughts of the day were diligently recollected, with 
 all the doings of hand and mouth since morning. As 
 the night drew near he shut up his mind, comparing 
 himself to a tradesman who takes in his wares, and 
 closes his windows in the evening. He said that 
 the student lives miserably who lies down, like a 
 camel, under a full burden. And so, calling his 
 family together, he ended the day with Gcd, and 
 took his rest, and rose up again, for He sustained 
 him. 
 
 Our own century supplies a companion picture. 
 The literary life of Southey was the rose-garden in 
 the pleasantest reading of the allegory. He has re- 
 corded the various occupations of the day, and seldom 
 were more learned fancies and religious hopes 
 collected into the space that comes 
 
 " Between the lark's note and the nightingale's." 
 
 Three pages of history — equal to five of a quarto — 
 were his morning task after breakfast ; transcribing, 
 copying for the press, biographical collections, or 
 what else suited his humour, filled up the gaps of 
 leisure until dinner-time. Then a different kind of 
 toil relieved him. He read, wrote letters, saw the 
 newspapers, indulged in a short slumber — for sleep, 
 in his agreeable confession, agreed with his constitu- 
 tion. Tea introduced poetry, and Thalaba or Ke- 
 hema underwent new trials, or exhibited more won- 
 derful magic. Supper wound up the chain of 
 thought, to strike the hours of another day with the 
 same regularity. And animating all his work is seen 
 a happy, Christian spirit, ever bringing the future 
 into the present, and sunning itself, by anticipation, 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. l6l 
 
 in the lights of a brighter communion. Most touch- 
 ing are his words : — " When I cease to be cheerful, 
 it is only to become contemplative — to feel at times 
 a wish that I was in that state of existence which 
 passes not away ; and this always ends in a new im- 
 pulse to proceed, that I may leave some durable 
 monument and some efficient good behind me." 
 
 Hitherto we have been gazing into the chamber 
 of the scholar, and the dreamer of magnificent 
 dreams ; but the cottage-window ought to show an 
 interior of beauty after its kind. There is no reason 
 why the brown hand of labour should not hold 
 Thomson, as well as the sickle. Ornamental reading 
 shelters and even strengthens the growth of what is 
 merely useful. A corn-field never returns a poorer 
 crop because a few wild-flowers bloom in the hedge. 
 The refinement of the poor is the triumph of Chris- 
 tian civilization. 
 
 It is growing. And now along the village-street, 
 or in the lone dwelling to which the green lane 
 winds, we often see the pleasing picture realized. 
 The lending library brings the good man's life, the 
 traveller's danger, or the martyr's victory, to the 
 winter hearth, and the garden-seat in summer. 
 Sweeter sights than these cheer our eyes — 
 
 " With due respect and joy 
 I trace the matron at her loved employ; 
 What time the striplings, wearied e'en with play, 
 Part at the closing of the summer's day, 
 And each by different path returns the well-known way. 
 Then I behold her at her cottage-door, 
 Frugal of light; her Bible laid before, 
 When on her double duty she proceeds, 
 Of time as frugal, knitting as she reads j 
 
 M 
 
l62 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Her idle neighbours, who approach to tell 
 Some trifling tale, her serious looks compel 
 To hear reluctant— while the lads who pass, 
 In pure respect, walk silent on the grass." 
 
 A story is told of a Roman who expended vast 
 sums in purchasing a household of learned slaves. 
 He wished to have the best poets and historians in 
 living editions. One servant recited the whole of 
 the Iliad; another chanted the Odes of Pindar. 
 Every standard author had a representative. The 
 free Press has replaced the bondman. Literature is 
 no longer an heirloom, nor can an emperor mono- 
 polize Horace. A small outlay obtains a choicer 
 collection of verses than the ancient amateur en- 
 joyed, and without the annoyances to which he was 
 subject. He had no familiar book for a corner, nor 
 any portable poet to be a companion in a field-walk^ 
 or under a tree. Not even Nero could compress a 
 slave into an Elzevir. Moreover, disappointments 
 sometimes occurred. Perhaps the deputy " Pindar" 
 was out of the way ; or a sudden indisposition of 
 u Homer" interrupted Ulysses in the middle of an 
 harangue, and left Hector stretching out his arms to 
 the child. 
 
 XXVI. — ACCOUNTABLENESS OF AUTHORS. 
 
 Few objects are more impressive than a large library 
 by moonlight. The deep stillness, the glimmering 
 books, and the lighted shadows upon the floor, affect 
 the mind with a strange solemnity — 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 63 
 
 rt At the midnight hour, 
 Slow through that studious gloom the pausing eye, 
 Led by the glimmering taper, moves around 
 The sacred volumes of the dead." 
 
 The student puts his hand upon a volume, the 
 legacy of a shining and depraved genius, with a 
 mournful remembrance of the words once uttered in 
 the high-priest's palace. In a very different sense 
 the speech betrays the writer. The sneer, the in- 
 sult, and the licence, are idioms of the dark kingdom. 
 How contemporaries flattered and successors magnify 
 the author ! His vices were weaknesses — the waste 
 splendour of a full mind. The chisel has touched 
 the stone into his image. His portraits hang in 
 noble galleries ; engravings tempt the eye in shop- 
 windows ; a thousand pages of panegyric build his 
 epitaph. Presently the whole life and works of the 
 departed man rise clearly before the musing eye, and 
 the Hand that scared the Babylonian seems to flash 
 along the shadowy wall, and the letters of fire to 
 start forth — 
 
 " By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be 
 condemned." 
 
 No homage to the false charity of the age, nor 
 any fear of its blame, should benumb this instinct of 
 sorrowful apprehension. I am not speaking of the 
 sinfulness which Chaucer and Boccaccio bewailed, 
 and Dryden at least acknowledged ; but of that 
 wilful and consistent impiety of which Biography 
 offers appalling illustrations. Hume, mocking 
 Heaven upon his dying pillow, rushed headlong, 
 with Lucian's ribaldry on his lips, into the dreadful 
 presence of the Judge ; and eyes that weep at a 
 
164 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 tragedy have no tears of blood for the saddest ever 
 beheld. 
 
 Southey was disappointed in being refused admis- 
 sion into Gibbon's garden. But what concern has 
 a Christian with the chamber where Messalina 
 wantoned, or the study in which Aretine blas- 
 phemed ? Intellectual guilt is to be punished with 
 severity proportioned to its turpitude and destruc- 
 tiveness. A book is even more than the life trea- 
 sured up which Milton considered it to be. It is the 
 soul disengaged from matter. It is a fountain that 
 flows for ever. What should be done to the man 
 who lavished his fortune in naturalizing a fever, and 
 organized a system of propagating the plague through 
 the post-office ? The execration of the world would 
 drive him into the wilderness. Yet it may well be 
 thought that a man had better be defiled in his 
 blood, than in his principles. 
 
 It has been conjectured, by more than one grand 
 and stern thinker, that a departed spirit may retain 
 a living sympathy with the evil fame and influence 
 of its earthly career, and receive intimations of the 
 corrupting and enduring might of Genius in a suc- 
 cession of direful shocks ; every quickening of the 
 pulse and clouding of the faith by a voluptuous, 
 or a sceptical book, darting a pang of intolerable 
 agony into the author's heart. Under this affecting 
 view of the accountableness of literature, we may 
 look upon each betrayal to vice and unbelief as a 
 dismal episode of spiritual torment ; upon each 
 deathbed of crime, first taught and cherished by the 
 ministry of the pen, as a sharper sting given to the 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 65 
 
 worm ; and upon fathers and mothers' sighs over 
 lost children, as so many gusts to freshen the flame 
 and the anguish of the Middle State. 
 
 An interesting record of a great writer, lately- 
 withdrawn from this earth, has been recorded by a 
 friend : — " The last time I saw Mr. Wordsworth, 
 he was in deep domestic sorrow, and beginning to 
 bend under the infirmities of old age. ' Whatever/ 
 he said, ( the world may think of me or of my 
 poetry is now of little consequence ; but one thing 
 is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works, 
 written since the days of my early youth, contains a 
 line I should wish to blot out because it panders to 
 the baser passions of our nature. This,' said he, 
 ' is a comfort tome; I can do no mischief by my 
 works when I am gone.' " 
 
 Books, of which the principles are diseased or 
 deformed, must be kept on the shelf of the scholar, 
 as the man of science preserves monsters in glasses. 
 They belong to the study of the mind's morbid 
 anatomy, and ought to be accurately labelled. Vol- 
 taire will still be a wit, notwithstanding he is a 
 scoffer; and we may admire the brilliant spots and 
 eyes of the viper, if we acknowledge its venom and 
 call it a reptile. 
 
 But the truth must be spoken — and for such of- 
 fendors what rebuke is too stern ? These are they 
 whose activity of evil grows with their fame ; who, 
 red all over with the blood of souls in life, do murder 
 even in their graves. If the servant, who hid his 
 talent in the ground, was driven from his Master's 
 presence into misery, what reward may he look for 
 
l66 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 who puts out his treasure with the dark exchanger, 
 and traffics in all the merchandise of sin ? That 
 author alone fulfills his calling to whom, in some de- 
 gree, a friend's panegyric of Addison may be applied 
 — that his compositions are but a preface, published 
 on earth, to that grander work of his death which is 
 to be read in heaven. 
 
 The accountableness of authors has been en- 
 forced; but there is likewise a responsibility of 
 readers. The deep reflection of Davenant admits 
 of a larger application, — "The plays of children are 
 punished ; the plays of men are excused under the 
 title of business." Readers, whose life is one long 
 task-work of idleness, may recollect that time is 
 religious money, certain at a future period to be 
 called in ; and that a sleepless Eye is keeping the 
 account. The column of debt will show an alarm- 
 ing balance, when the outrages of Eugene Sue, and 
 the politer wickedness of the French lady who calls 
 herself a man, are seen to have absorbed the hours, 
 or even the leisure of a week. 
 
 Feminine education is beyond the boundary of 
 this Discourse. Yet surely the mission of Woman 
 demands a higher teaching than modern instruction 
 usually affords. It is an adjustment of mechanism 
 rather than a shaping of mind. One might imagine 
 that the ultimate aim and result of her creation were 
 to be realised, in the pursuit of some flying composer 
 of visionary swiftness ; in pasturing uncomfortable 
 cows upon thirsty fields of red chalk; or exhibiting 
 the Great Mogul scowling frightfully in worsted. 
 In this respect the nineteenth century will gain little 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 167 
 
 applause by a parallel with the sixteenth ; when the 
 brightest eyes were familiar with Greek as now 
 with Rossini ; and a Latin letter to Ascham about 
 Plato was run off with the fluent grace of an invita- 
 tion to a wedding. Some thinkers will perceive in 
 those decorations of the mind a lasting fascination, 
 not always found in later accomplishments, and con- 
 sider them more likely to win unquiet hearts from 
 wandering and turmoil — 
 
 "To fireside happiness and hours of ease, 
 Blest with that charm — the certainty to please." 
 
 XXVII. — The cultivated Mind and the 
 
 UNINFORMED. 
 
 It was a happy thought to compare a mind, enriched 
 by reading and reflection, to a room in which a 
 person talks with a beautiful woman, among the 
 balmy lights of a summer evening ; and to see the 
 image of a mind, neglected and rude, in the same 
 apartment, when the sun is set and the lovely 
 occupant has gone away. The man of taste and 
 learning recognizes himself in a figure. The cheer- 
 ing presence of Beauty and the magical effects of 
 colour are continually within him ; while Ignorance 
 sits dark and lonely, till education opens its eyes to 
 the flush of radiance, and unlocks its ears to the wise 
 charming of the Charmer, — 
 
 u The sweetest Lady of the time, 
 Well worthy of the golden prime." 
 
 The pleasure is within the reach of all true seekers. 
 The common flower does not grow by the cottage- 
 
l68 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 door more joyfully in the sun and rain. Mirandula 
 mentions a plant whose leaf, taking a strong hold of 
 the earth, shoots up into flourishing branches. The 
 fiction of the Italian seems to be an emblem of 
 Knowledge. A winter evening thoughtfully em- 
 ployed may be the leaf, that, striking its root down- 
 ward and spreading upward, will be covered all over 
 with boughs and fruit. A day opens into a week, 
 a week blossoms into a month, until the persevering 
 learner is embowered and refreshed by the foliage 
 and the clusters of a year. Every fresh acquirement 
 is another remedy against affliction and time. The 
 sick soul possesses a holier hospital for its fever, or 
 its wounds ; but Literature is often a portico, or 
 outer chamber ; and Homer prepared a costly elixir, 
 when he showed Minerva concealing the wrinkles 
 of Ulysses. 
 
 A good book has been likened to a well-chosen 
 orchard tree, carefully tended. Its fruits are not of 
 one season. Year by year it yields abundant pro- 
 duce, and often of a richer hue and flavour. Blanco 
 White, reading Tasso after thirty years of neglect, 
 gives cheering testimony : — " If I open the treasures 
 of Literature which nourished my mind in youth, I 
 feel young again, and my mind seems to be trans- 
 ported into the regions of love and beauty, which I 
 can now better enjoy than during the fever of the 
 passions." 
 
 Perhaps the calmer industry of the matured taste 
 helps it to find the hidden fragrance. Many flowers 
 — gay and flaunting — the commonest insects may 
 rifle ; but only the bee's tongue reaches the honey 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 69 
 
 when it lies in a long tube. Moreover, the toil of 
 the bee is always tranquil ; its hum ceases over the 
 blossom. From numberless books the fluttering 
 reader — idle and inconstant — bears away the bloom 
 that only clings to the outer leaf; but Genius has 
 its nectaries, delicate glands, and secresies of sweet- 
 ness, — and upon these the thoughtful mind must 
 settle in its labour, before the choice perfume of 
 fancy and wisdom is drawn forth. 
 
 The truest blessing of Literature is found in the 
 inward light and peace which it bestows. Bentley 
 advised his nephew never to read a book that he 
 could not quote ; as if the thrush in the May leaves 
 did not contradict the caution. The music of wis- 
 dom is in the heart. 
 
 And this sequestered spirit of meditative enjoy- 
 ment is recognized in much of our early Fancy and 
 Learning. D'Israeli indicates a certain alarm at the 
 Printing Press. The publisher of England's Helicon 
 pasted slips over the names of the contributors. 
 Sidney wrote the Arcadia for the woods of Wilton. 
 SackvihVs Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates 
 was sent abroad unacknowledged. 
 
 A sincere lover of Literature loves it for itself 
 alone ; and it rewards his affection. He is sheltered 
 as in a fortress. Whatever troubles and sorrows may 
 besiege him outside, his well of water, his corn, and 
 his wine, are safe within the walls. The world is 
 shut out. Even in the tumult of great affairs he is 
 undisturbed. Dr. Harvey, the discoverer of the cir- 
 culation of the blood, had the two young princes 
 entrusted to his care at the battle of Edgehill ; having 
 
170 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 withdrawn them to a short distance from the fight, 
 he sat down under a hedge, and taking a book from 
 his pocket, quietly perused it, until a ball from a gun 
 grazed the ground close by, and obliged him to 
 retire. 
 
 An affecting instance of the tenderness and the 
 compensations of Learning is furnished by the old 
 age of Usher, when no spectacles could help his 
 failing sight, and a book was dark except beneath the 
 strongest light of the window. Hopeful and re- 
 signed he continued his task, following the sun from 
 room to room through the house he lived in, until 
 the shadows of the trees disappeared from the grass, 
 and the day was gone. How strange and delightful 
 must have been his feelings, when the sunbeam fell 
 brilliantly upon some half-remembered passage, and 
 thought after thought shone out from the misty 
 words, like the features of a familiar landscape in a 
 clearing fog. 
 
 Pleasant it would be for us, in our gloomier hours 
 of time and sadness, if we might imitate that Indian 
 bird which, enjoying the sunshine all the day, 
 secures a faint reflection of it in the night, by stick- 
 ing glow-worms over the walls of its nest. And 
 something of this light is obtained from the books 
 read in youth, to be remembered in age — 
 
 " And summer's green all girded up in sheaves." 
 
 Coleridge said that the scenes of his childhood were 
 so deeply written on his mind, that when upon a 
 still, shining day of summer he shut his eyes, the 
 river Otter ran murmuring down the room, with the 
 
ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 171 
 
 soft tints of its waters, the crossing plank, the willows 
 on the margin, and the coloured sands of its bed. 
 The lover of books has memories, also, not less sweet 
 or dear. Having drunk of the pure springs of Intel- 
 lect in his childhood, he will continue to quench his 
 thirst from them in the heat, the burden, and the 
 decline of the day. The corrupted streams of popu- 
 lar entertainment flow by him unregarded. He lives 
 among the society of an elder age. Tasteful Learn- 
 ing he numbers with the chiefest blessings of his 
 home ; when clasping the hand of Religion, it be- 
 comes its Vassal and its Friend. By this union he 
 obtains the watchfulness and the guidance of two 
 companions, loving and beloved, who redouble his 
 delights in health, bring flowers to his pillow in sick- 
 ness, and shed the lustre and the peace of the Past 
 and the Future over the blackness and the con- 
 sternation of the Present. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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