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wherein they claim affinity with classic prototypes, were not impressed upon them from the originals in Greek or Roman song, but were transmitted, and transformed by transmission, to them through the enchanted medium of Arabian genius, seizing whatever it found of beauty or grandeur in the productions of taste, and making all it seized as much its own in appearance as though it were indigenous to the soil, whither in reality it had been recently transplanted.

The Revival of Literature in Europe.

Giants, dragons, necromancers, griffins, and a thousand other antic forms of men and animals, that people poetry and romance, were all either natives or foundlings of the east: so were the more delicate progeny of fairies, gnomes, sylphs, salamanders spirits of the elements entirely distinct from the mythological beings which classic fable had created there. Of fairies, especially, the delight of childhood, and, in their place, not less the delight of age, renewing in luxurious reverie the feelings of childhood of fairies it may be said that nothing was ever invented by the wit of man so finely fanciful so real, and yet so aërial; that to this hour, when their existence is no longer even a vulgar error, they continue to be so exquisitely marvellous, and withal so natural, that they are the very population of the world of poetry. Without these brilliant and awful creations of enthusiastic sensibility - I now allude to the gigantic and terrible, as well as to the minute

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and beautiful, — in every form of fear, and love, and hope personified, in warmer, richer, fairer lands, where mechanical labour is little known, and where, from the earliest times, traditional lore of wonders has been the literature of tribes, fierce, fiery, and roving, like the Arabs, or a people indolent and voluptuous, like the Persians; without these brilliant and awful creations of oriental minds, the poetry of modern Europe might never have arisen above mediocrity—the freezing point of imitation, where all may be as splendid, yet as cold and unsubstantial, as figured frost-work, or drifted snow, or transparent ice. Modern poetry, we may presume, scarcely could have risen above this inanimate mediocrity, because it would have wanted machinery a race of supernatural beings of ethereal origin, to supply the vacant thrones of Olympus.

The mythology of Greece and Rome, in their native songs, fills the mind and transports the imagination, but rarely touches the affections: the divinities of these highly intellectual people were as little calculated to excite human sympathies (though invested with human passions, and boundless impunity in the indulgence of them) as their own images in marble and brass in their temples, and by the public ways. That kind of epic machinery belonged exclusively to the periods, during which it was the religion of the multitude, and while it remained the secret whereby the great and the learned held that multitude at once in ignorance and subjection. Hence the deities of Homer and Virgil have never been introduced with happy effect into modern verse of high order. There

is not a popular heroic poem in any living language, in which they have been well employed; nay, there is not one in which they have been employed at all, where they are not an absolute encumbrance

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to say nuisance. The truth is, that they destroy poetical probability the moment they appear on the scene; disenchanting the glorious unreality, which the man of true genius makes a million-fold more real to the feelings and fancy of his readers than the most accurate and elaborate representation of facts in history can be. There are, indeed, some lyrical pieces, especially Italian canzoni, and, in our own language, some playful love songs, and other trifles, in which the divinities of ancient times are quite at "home.

But from "the highest heaven of invention" Jove and his senate are for ever and for ever fallen; so that it would be as rational, and about as easy, to rebuild their temples, and restore their worship, as to reinstate them in the honours and immortality which they once enjoyed on Parnassus, and which, as their only immortality, they will possess so long as the literary relics of Greece and Rome are studied and admired. On the other hand, the oriental mythology, if I may so style it, as soon as the revival of letters in the south of Europe revived the most elegant of all the forms which letters can assume, Poetry, which is the language of the noblest minds, and itself most noble when most intelligible; - the oriental mythology at once supplied a machinery, gloomy, splendid, gay, and terrible, for every occasion, as the one or the other might be wanted. The poems of modern

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date, (those I mean which have outlived their century,) most celebrated, and which will be longest remembered, owe half their inspiration, and more than half their popularity, to its influence. For examples we need but recollect the " Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto, the "Gerusalemme Liberata" of Tasso, the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser, and, to crown all, the "Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" of Shakspeare. But these belong to a later period.

Of the literature of the middle ages it may generally be said, that it was "voluminous and vast." Princes, nobles, and even priests then were often ignorant of the alphabet. The number of authors was proportionally small, and the subjects on which they wrote were of the driest nature in polemics-such were the subtleties of the schoolmen; of the most extravagant character in the paths of imagination—such were the romances of chivalry, the legends and songs of troubadours; and of the most preposterous tendency in philosophy, so called,-such were the treatises on magic, alchymy, judicial astrology, and the metaphysics. To say all that could be said on any theme, whether in verse or prose, was the fashion of the times; and, as few read but those who were devoted to reading by an irresistible passion or professional necessity, and few wrote but those who were equally impelled by an inveterate instinct,—great books were the natural produce of the latter, who knew not how to make little ones; and great books were requisite to appease the voracity of the former, who, for the most part, were rather gluttons than epicures in their taste for literature. Great books, therefore, were both the

fruits and the proofs of the ignorance of the age: they were usually composed in the gloom and torpor of the cloister, and it almost required a human life to read the works of an author of the first magnitude, because it was nearly as easy to compound as to digest such crudities. The common people, under such circumstances, could feel no interest and derive no advantage from the labours of the learned, which were equally beyond their purchase and their comprehension. Those libri elephantini (like the registers of the Roman citizens, when the latter amounted to millions) contained little more than catalogues of things, and thoughts, and names, in words without measure, and often without meaning worth searching out; so that the lucubrations, through a thousand years, of many a noble, many a lovely mind, which only wanted better direction how to unfold its energies, or display its graces, to benefit or delight mankind, were but passing meteors, that made visible the darkness out of which they rose, and into which they sunk again, to be hid for ever.

It is remarkable, that while the classic regions of Europe, as well as the northern and western colonies of the dissolved Roman empire, were buried in barbarian ignorance, learning found a temporary refuge in some of the least distinguished parts of the then known world—in Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Scotland, and even in Ireland.

And here these papers must conclude, having brought our cursory retrospect to the thirteenth century, an era at which the minds of the people of Europe were already prepared (though scarcely con

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