applauses that before attended them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and sweetest, the most general and most innocent amusements of common time and life. They still find room in the courts of princes and the cottages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I know very well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave are apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible to their charms would, I think, do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of reproaching their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their natures, if not of their understandings, into question. While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of these two entertainments will do so too; and happy those that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent, and do not trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them." "When all is done" (he concludes), "human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS.

PUBLISHED UNDER THE TITLE THAT GREAT WIT IS ALLIED TO

MADNESS."

So far from the position holding true that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,

66 -did Nature to him frame,

As all things but his judgment overcame;
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below."

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet.

But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay ; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a “human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness nor this misanthropy so unchecked but that-never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so-he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood till they wonder at themselves, like Indian islanders forced to submit to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference) as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced, that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless, their visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active-for to be active is to call something into act and form —but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the supernatural, or something superadded to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of Nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot and a little wantonised; but even in the describing of real and everyday life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature-show more of that inconsequence which has a natural alliance with frenzy-than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one who is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels-as they existed some twenty or thirty years back-those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms-whether he has not found his brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no characters, of some third-rate love intrigue, where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond Street-a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the

persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive-we meet phantoms in our known walks: fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction, and we have absolutely no place at all; for the things and persons of the "Faery Queen" prate not of their whereabout. But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of everyday occurrences. By what subtle art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours-with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream-that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace, and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, -is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his wildest seeming aberrations.

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep; it is in some sort-but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.

NUGE CRITICE.

DEFENCE OF THE SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY.

SYDNEY'S Sonnets-I speak of the best of them-are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are, in truth, what Milton, censuring the "Arcadia," says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), "vain and amatorious" enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be "full of worth and wit." They savour of the courtier, it must be

allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify he could speak his mind freely to princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold.

The sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very. heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fancies, far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation: for true love thinks no labour to send out thoughts upon vast and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the beloved. We must be lovers, or at least the cooling touch of Time, the circum præcordia frigus must not have so damped our faculties as to take away our recollection that we were once so-before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities and graceful hyperboles of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural for the high Sydnian love to express its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Catullus, or the dear author of the "Schoolmistress;" for passions that creep and whine in elegies and pastoral ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses (ad Leonoram, I mean) have rather erred on the farther side, and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum when he could thus apostrophise a singing-girl :

Angelus unicuique suns (sic credite gentes)

Obtigit athereis ales ab ordinibus.
Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria
major,

Nam tua præsentem vox sonat ipsa
Deum?

Aut Deus, aut vacui certè mens tertia
cali,

Per tua secretò guttura serpit agens: Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda

Sensim immortali assuescere posse

sono.

QUOD SI CUNCta quidem Deus est,
PER CUNCTAQUE FUSUS,
IN TE
UNA LOQUITUR, CÆTERA
MUTUS HABET.

This is loving in a strange fashion, and it requires some candour of construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the lover would have been staggered if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowip with his mortal passions.

The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue ?