encumbered by pedantry, as in Ben Jonson; almost forgotten in the clap-trap of circumstance and accident, as in the dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher; too much modelled upon those of Calderon, known to the student of Spanish literature as comedies of the cloak and sword; or gushing out, clear and sparkling, like living water, as in the dramatist of all time and place, who has won for our land a prouder trophy than any that her gold could buy, or her arms could win ;-whether it may have eluded the drama altogether, as it did when Chatterton was writing his forgeries, and Gray and Collins were composing their matchless odes; still, wherever its inspiration can be traced,-to detect it, to own it, and to publish it, has been the part of æsthetical criticism. Kaimes and Blair, especially the latter,-men who viewed it as an art-would correct and laud, would lay down rules, till our literature should be barren and dull as a straight road over some dismal heath; but as a science, it has principles which defy the rigid letter of the law. It is essentially Catholic; it would make the production of no time or place the Procrustean bed, by which to measure and regulate the production of all other times and places. The great fundamental article of its belief is, that a sham cannot live that whatever may have floated upon the wave of time, so as to come within our reach, must have had in it something of reality and life. The age may have given it a motley and fantastic garb; euphuism, and alliteration, and affected wit, and quaint conceit, may have disguised it: but the fact that it is that it has not ceased to be, when so many things that were are notthat when I read it, it makes me feel, in spite of its grotesqueness and antiquity; tells me that there is in it beauty, vitality, truth. Beneath the gay dress of a harlequin, or the cowl of a monk: beneath the fustian of a peasant, or the purple of an emperor, there are the same hearts, that, true to their common humanity, will meet, and swell, and throb with common sorrows, and hopes, and joys. Given the same cause of joy or sorrow, and, in spite of the fustian or the purple, the peasant and the emperor have a sameness of feeling and of heart. The homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto of Terence, is the spirit of æsthetical criticism. Nothing that my brother has written or can write, how that heart of his has felt, what it has taken for the beautiful in thought, or the graceful in language; all this claims my study and respect. : Take the school-boy debate of Boyle and Bentley, the English managers of the question relative to ancient and modern learning, for it was a pons asinorum to many a learned controversial head as well; for instance, Fontenelle and Boileau, in France. Imagine Sir William Temple, a statesman and a philosopher, gravely writing to prove the authenticity of a performance which the reputed author had never written, and which he (Sir William) had never read, a mere question of words. What is true and beautiful in the remains of antiquity is so not because it was written by Cicero or Virgil, but because of its conformity to that which was the same eighteen hundred years back that it is now, that is, man's universal heart. Whatever conforms to that, whether written in the time of Homer or now, has on it the stamp of excellence, and is true and whatever does not, is false. Truth, reality, nature, relatively to composition, as to every thing else, are in the end the same. The snatches of old song, with which Ophelia made vocal her watery grave; the old song that Barbara sung, and that Desdemona "could not choose" but sing, that fatal night whose morrow looked on her lifeless clay, and that of her lion-hearted lord; Christopher Marlowe's simple ballad, "Come live with me and be my love," which good honest Isaac Walton called " old fashioned poetry, but choicely good;" the heroic lay of "Chevy Chase," which moved the heart of the chivalrous Sir Philip Sidney, so that, to use his own language, "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet, and yet it is sung by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style". '—a ballad, indeed, so full of beauty that the fastidious Addison, the man who carried the doctrine of the unities to an extreme, who gave to Cowley, to Roscommon, "The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," to use the words of his brother critic and cotemporary, Pope, that lavished praise he denied to Chaucer, (vide Addison's account of the greatest English poets, in the first volume of his miscellaneous works) was compelled to yield it the homage it required; the lyrical poetry of such men as Herrick, and such as we find ferating here and there throughout the whole of the Elizabethan drama, at this time they tell with a power on the human heart equal to that with which they at first impelled the poet who wrote them, and woke up a response, a fellowship of feeling and of fire, in the bosom of the first man who heard them sung. Even in spite of time, though the very men who wrote them might, if set down amongst us, be looked upon as men of a strange land and uncouth tongue, do they carry with them the stamp of nature, of truth. It is not the rule of the formal pedant or plodding critic, who is generally fortunate to exemplify, as a writer, the faults which, as a critic, he condemns; as some good natured men learned when they tried Blair's Sermons by Blair's Lectures, and found them wanting. It is not whether the unities are kept or not: a paltry question, since it is easy to imagine a change of place, or time, or any thing else. It is not whether the drama drags its slow length along the required number of acts, or whether the novel gracefully expands itself into the three octavos which custom requires. Many a drama and novel that had these requisites, and more, the trunkmaker has appropriated to himself. It is not conformity to the criticism of an age; for that being but the age's theory of the beautiful, must be one-sided, and consequently short-lived. The critics of an age have exclaimed "divine !" over many a poem, and written "immortal" on many a work, whose names and writers are alike unknown. Life, reality, are the only conditions of existence. To the highest beauty, truth is an essential requisite. On right principles, what is not true cannot be called beautiful. Look at Cowley, some parts of Pope, and even Shakspeare (for we cannot quite go along with Professor Ulrici, and deny that our sun has spots) some of Dryden, his heroic plays and those of his eager cotemporaries and better rivals. The only thing Dryden's heroic plays want is truth. As a mere writer, no man can vie with him; his language has the rare merit of being harmonious and yet at the same time free from monotony: unlike the too smooth versification of Pope, who, though more praised than Dryden, is in reality his inferior. What makes bombast? not the mock heroic, as the Rape of the Lock; but sheer bombast where you often have fine language and imagery, and versification not at all deficient, and yet the whole insupportable, but its want of truth; it is strained, unnatural, and unreal. It is in the mind that beauty has its dwelling, and not in the critic's page. The conception of beauty is the heart owning a fellow-feeling with something from without, and kindling up with it. As is a mirror to the outward world, so is the beautiful to the heart that cherishes it: of the beautiful, as a whole, one principal division is a national literature; and, above all, the national idea of literature in general, and its own in particular. This modifies, more than any thing else, the productions of an age, as a glance at our own literature will teach. To the life and permanency of any work, it is essential it should be in accordance with the heart of man, which is everywhere the same. Such being the case, the rules of the professed critic, in the majority of cases, are wrong: they are but that man's theory and nothing more. The French critics object to the ghost scene in "Hamlet;" they say it is a violation of the unity of action: but who else objects to it? Obviously, then, much of what has been called criticism must pass away, new elements have been called into being, man has learned that his heart is to go forth, in love and good-will, to his fellowman; that life is many-sided, and that if man's feelings are to be roused, or man's passions to be depicted, it must be by one who can see beauty in the mixed splendours of the rainbow, or the chameleon's varying hue: by one who can admire, alike, the grass we tread, or the towering oak. Even critics are opening their eyes to the fact, that it by no means follows, that because the Æneid contains twelve books, therefore, anything else having the required number of twelve books, should be an epic poem, or a poem at all; and your isolated criticisms, your criticisms of a certain time and place, have another fault, they induce a one-sidedness in the critic. You take some standard, be it French, English, Italian, or what you will; and whatever does not agree with your self-elected standard, you pronounce to be worthless, and throw it away; which is but another mode of telling half the people in the world, they are writing nonsense; and what right has one man to say this to another, granting that his sanity be not suspected? Alexander the Great, from malformation, was forced to wear his head on one side,-out of politeness, his courtiers did the same. It was as natural to him to have his head on one side, as it was to them to have theirs upright; what was natural in him, was gross affectation in them. Not altogether dissimilar, has been the case with some critical Alexander, whether he sat in his dirty garret, in Bolt court, or discussed poetry and coffee, with a band of gay Templars at Wills, or whether, as in these more modern and enlightened times, he amazed a crowd of literary ladies and elderly gentlemen, in the lecture-room of the Institution in Albermarlestreet, with criticisms, borrowed, though quite unconsciously, from Germany, and with blunders that might have been his own. Now, by æsthetical criticism, we understand every thing opposed to this,-whatever is not partial, one-sided, local; the listening to the written thought of man, in every age and place of his existence, and owning its merit, so far as we conceive the man, to the best of his ability, wrote it from the heart. To the bigot, every god but his own, is an impostor; every creed, but his own, a lie. Strange is the jargon of foreign tongues; but the man who can understand them, can find sense, and harmony, and beauty, in all; the discord, even of a Babel, is but, THE MISSING SHIP. WHAT is it that they look upon with sad and troubled eye, And on our quays, and in our streets, there gathereth fast the crowd, What is it makes the maiden mourn, as restlessly she lies, What is it makes the mother, in the wildness of her dream, And why doth she, the lonely, the widowed, wake to weep, And whither sails the bark, that bore this goodly crew, Or has it sped its way unto some coral isle, And sad and weary there rest they themselves awhile? Or angrily did it, the earth encircling sea, With giant voice call forth its strength and majesty, To some lone, rocky bank, and glutted, leave them then? Or, angrier still, did it, in the fierceness of its wrath, Ride forth unto its work of death, with crested crown of froth, And springing on its prey, as tiger from its lair, Did it hide them in its endless depths, and leave none living there? The God who rides the mountain wave, who sails along the storm, |