geneous population; where every building was a castle or a palace, an Arcadian cottage or a hermitage in the wilderness.

The second era, from Dryden to Cowper, bore a nearer resemblance to a nobleman's domain, surrounding his family mansion, where all was taste and elegance and splendour within; painting, sculpture, and literature forming its proudest embellishments: - while without, the eye ranged with voluptuous freedom over the paradise of the park, woods, waters, lawns, temples, statues, obelisks, and points of perspective so cunningly contrived, as to startle the beholder with unexpected delight; nature and art having changed characters; and each, in masquerade of the other, playing at hide and seek amidst the self-involving labyrinths of landscape gardening.

At length, when both the eye and the heart had been wearied for more than a century with the golden mediocrity of these, in which nothing was so awful as deeply to agitate, nor so familiar as tenderly to interest, the Bristol youths already named boldly broke through the restraint, and hazarded a new style, in which simplicity, homeliness, common names, every-day objects, and ordinary events, were made the themes and the ornaments of poetry. These naturally assimilate themselves with what is emphatically called "the country," "each rural sight, each rural sound;" the loves and graces of domestic life, the comforts of our own fire-side; the flowery array of meadows, the green gaiety of hedge-rows, the sparkling vivacity of rivulets; kind intercourse

with neighbours, the generous ardour of patriotism, and the gentler emotions of benevolence. Such furnished the "perpetual feast of nectared sweets" set before their readers by those innovators on the courtly formality of the old school; but the charm of their song was too often interrupted by the coarseness of vulgar manners and the squalidness of poverty, - too nearly associated with physical disgusts, to be the unpolluted source of ideal delights.

This, therefore, could not last long; the subjects which might be rendered interesting were soon exhausted. Hence this ramble after Nature in her humblest forms and her obscurest haunts was only a holiday frolic; and these wayward sons of genius, by their high endowments, were destined to give a more heroic tone, a more magnificent character to the literature of their country. Southey, by his marvellous excursions in the regions both of history and romance, Coleridge, oy his wild fictions of a class entirely his own, in which there is an indescribable witchery of phrase and conceit, that affects the imagination as if one had eaten of "the insane root that takes the reason prisoner;" — and Wordsworth, by his mysticism, his Platonic love of the supreme good and the supreme beauty, which he seeks every where, and finds wherever he seeks, in the dancing of daffodils, the splendour of the setting sun, the note of a cuckoo flitting like a spirit from hill to hill, which neither the eye nor ear can follow, and in the everlasting silence of the universe to the man born deaf and dumb; - these were the three pioneers, if not the absolute founders, of the existing style of

English literature, which has become so diversified, artificial, and exquisite, so gorgeously embellished, and adapted to every taste, as well as so abundant in its resources by importations from the wealth of every other land, that it may challenge similitude to the great metropolis of our empire, where the brain of a stranger, like myself, is bewildered amidst the infinite forms of human beings, human dwellings, human pursuits, human enjoyments, and human sufferings; perpetual motion, perpetual excitement, perpetual novelty; city manners, city edifices, city luxuries; — all these being not less strikingly characteristic of the literature of this age, than the fairyland of adventure, and the landscape gardening of "capability Brown," were characteristic of the two periods from Spenser to Milton, and from Dryden to Cowper.

If the literature of the middle ages (as was shown in a former paper*), were principally composed of crude, enormous, indigestible masses, fitted only to monkish appetites, that could gorge iron like ostriches, when iron was cast into the shape of thought, or thought assumed the nature of iron, -the literature of the present day is entirely the reverse, and so are all the circumstances connected with it. Then there were few readers, and fewer writers; now there are many of both; and among those that really deserve the name of the former, it would be difficult to ascertain the relative proportion of the latter, for most of

* See the Third Part of " A Retrospect of Literature," &c.

them in one way or another might be classed with writers. The vehicles, opportunities, and tempt ations of publishing are so frequent, so easy and unexpensive, that a man can scarcely be connected with intelligent society, without being seduced, in some frail moment, to try how his thoughts will look in print: then, for a second or two at least, he feels as the greatest genius in the world feels on the same occasion," laudum immensa cupido," a longing after immortality, that mounts into a hope a hope that becomes a conviction of the power of realising itself, in all the glory of ideal reality; than which no actual reality ever afterward is half so enchantingly enjoyed.

Hence the literature of our time is commensurate with the universality of education; nor is it less various than universal to meet capacities of all sizes, minds of all acquirements, and tastes of every degree. Books are multiplied on every subject on which any thing or nothing can be said, from the most abstruse and recondite to the most simple and puerile: and while the passion of book-jobbers is to make the former as familiar as the latter by royal ways to all the sciences, there is an equally perverse rage among genuine authors to make the latter as august and imposing as the former, by disguising common place topics with the colouring of imagination, and adorning the most insignificant themes with all the pomp of verse. This degradation of the high, and exaltation of the low, this dislocation, in fact, of every thing, is one of the most striking proofs of the extraordinary diffusion of knowledge, — and of its cor

ruption too, if not a symptom of its declension by being so heterogeneously blended, till all shall be neutralised. Indeed, when millions of intellects, of as many different dimensions and as many different degrees of culture, are perpetually at work, and it is almost as easy to speak as to think, and to write as to speak, there must be a proportionate quantity of thought put into circulation.

Meanwhile, public taste, pampered with delicacies even to loathing, and stimulated to stupidity with excessive excitement, is at once ravenous and mawkish, gratified with nothing but novelty, nor with novelty itself for more than an hour. To meet this diseased appetite, in prose not less than in verse, a factitious kind of the marvellous has been invented, consisting not in the exhibition of supernatural incidents or heroes, but in such distortion, high colouring, and exaggeration of natural incidents and ordinary personages, by the artifices of style, and the audacity of sentiment employed upon them, as shall produce that sensation of wonder in which half-instructed minds delight. This preposterous effort at display may be traced through every walk of polite literature, and in every channel of publication; nay, it would hardly be venturing too far to say that every popular author is occasionally a juggler, ropedancer, or posture-maker, in this way, to propitiate those of his readers, who will be pleased with nothing less than feats of legerdemain in the exercises of the pen.