period of human history have been altogether so calculated to awaken, inspirit, and perfect every species of intellectual energy, it is no arrogant assumption in favor of the living, no disparagement of the merits of the dead, to assert the manifest superiority of the former in developed powers-powers of the rarest and most elevated kind in poetry.

CHAPTER IV.

BRITISH NOVELS AND ROMANCES.

In what are properly called novels, fictitious narra tives of common life, the period between Pope and Cowper was more prolific than any preceding one. Indeed, the genuine novel was yet a novelty, which originated, or, rather, was introduced in the merry reign of Charles II., but never had been carried to its height of humor and reality till Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson, each in his peculiar and unrivaled way, displayed its utmost capabilities of painting men and manners as they are.

These were followed by "numbers without number," and without name, that peopled the shelves of the circulating libraries with the motley progeny of their brain.

"The Waverley Novels," by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly the most extraordinary works of the age; but exceedingly faulty in one literary point of view. The author, in his best performances, has blended fact and fiction, both in incidents and characters, so frequently, and made his pictures at once so natural to the life, yet often so contrary to historical verity, that henceforward it will be difficult to distinguish the imaginary from the real with regard to one or the other; thus the credulity of ages to come will be abused in the estimate of men, and the identity of events by the glowing illusion of his pages, in which the details are so minute and exquisite, that the truth of painting will win the author credit for truth of eve

ry other kind, and most, it may be, where he least deserves it.

CHAPTER V.

THE BRITISH PERIODICAL PRESS.

BUT it is in the issues from the periodical press that the chief influence of literature in the present day consists. Newspapers alone, if no other evidence were to be adduced, would prove, incontrovertibly, the immense and hitherto unappreciated superiority, in point of mental culture, of the existing generation over all their forefathers, since Britain was invaded by Julius Cæsar. The talents, learning, ingenuity, and eloquence employed in the conduct of many of these-the variety of information conveyed through their columns from every quarter of the globe, to the obscurest cottage, and into the humblest mind of the realm, render newspapers, not luxuries, which they might be expected to be among an indolent and voluptuous population, but absolute necessaries of life-the daily food of millions of the most active, intelligent laborers, the most shrewd, indefatigable, and enterprising tribes on the face of the earth.

Of higher rank, though far inferior potency, are the magazines: they rather reflect the image of the public mind, than contribute toward forming its features or giving it expression. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine at this time (1831) probably takes the lead among the fraternity, and by the boldness, hilarity, and address with which it is managed, it has become equally formidable in politics and predominant in literature. In both of these departments the New Monthly, the London, the Metropolitan, Frazer's Magazine, and others assume a high station.

These writings display admirable talents, but are obnoxious to the censure that, in the style of their leading articles, all is effort, and splendor, and display -it is fine acting which falls short of nature.

Reviews not only rank higher than magazines in

literature-rather by usurpation than right-but they rival newspapers themselves in political influence, while they hold divided empire with the weightier classes of literature, books of every size, and kind, and character, on which, moreover, they exercise an authority peculiar to the present age, and never dreamed of by critics in any past period. The Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the Westminster, and the Eclectic are the most prominent of the British reviews.

Besides these, works of the largest kind and the most elaborate structure, in every department of learning, abound in Britain: cyclopedias without measure, compilations without number, besides original treatises, which equally show the industry, talent, and acquirements of authors in all ranks of society, and of every gradation of intellect.

CHAPTER VI.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS AND CRITICS OF THE PRESENT CENTURY.

Extracted from the North American Review, 1835.

DUGALD STEWART, by far the most distinguished of the English (British) philosophers who have lived since Adam Smith, was a beautiful writer, and possessed a large store of book-learning, which he has digested into several interesting, systematic works, which display, however, but little originality. He pursues with patience the track of the masters whom he venerated, smoothing obstructions, removing difficulties, scattering flowers as he goes-but he strikes out no new paths. Mackintosh, with an equal elegance of taste, had a higher power of thought, but his works have done no justice to his talent. Coleridge, who is now extolled by some of his admirers, especially on this side of the Atlantic, where his reputation, singularly enough, is greater than in England-as the first of philosophers, and, as such, the "greatest man of the age," appears to us, we must own, to possess very slender claims to this transcendent distinction. He

possessed, undoubtedly, a mind of a very high order, and was particularly fitted to excel in poetry, of which he has given some exquisite specimens; but even here the fatal influence of indolence, or some other still more pernicious principle, has prevented him from doing himself justice. In his philosophical writings he shows a great deal of reading, but an almost total want of clearness and precision of thought. His mind seems to be swelling and laboring with a chaos of imaginations, which he has not reduced to shape, and of which he is, of course, incapable of estimating the real value. The only principle that stands out in some degree conspicuously in the midst of this confusion, and which he seems to have intended to make the corner-stone of his system, is a supposed distinction between reason and understanding, or, in his own phraseology, the reason and the understanding, which we consider as wholly imaginary, and which, whether well or ill founded, has been for more than half a century the basis of the German transcendental metaphysics, and of course can entitle Coleridge to no great credit on the score of original power. Nor has he, as far as we can perceive, succeeded in establishing this principle, or even making it distinctly intelligible to his readers. A person who is curious on the subject will learn more from the first ten pages of Kant's Criticism on Pure Reason, where the supposed distinction, such as it is, is intelligibly stated, than from the whole of Coleridge's never-ending-still-beginning attempts to explain it, in which the English language breaks down with him at every step.

Thomas Carlyle is, we think, the most profound and original of the living English philosophical writers. He is the person to whom we look with the greatest confidence to give a new spring and direction to these studies in the mother-country. In fact, the sceptre of philosophy, though it seems to have passed from Germany to France, where it is now wielded by the distinguished Cousin, still lingers on the Continent of Europe, and will not, probably, be transferred very soon to England. Coleridge and Carlyle are both, like

Cousin himself, disciples of the German transcendental school.

In the North American Review for 1844, the style of Carlyle, as a writer, is censured in the following caustic terms. We insert the criticism to discourage students from an imitation of his style.

Mr. Carlyle is a man of genius, learning, and humane tendencies. His brilliant thoughts often break through the ragged clouds of his most absurd phraseology, and make us grieve that an author, capable of writing so well, should write so execrably; should spoil the effect of his fine powers by the paltry folly of imitating so bad a model as Jean Paul Richter, an "original" writer who kept a commonplace book of odd expressions and far-fetched figures, which he embroidered on the ground of his natural style. Thus, Carlyle rejected his own English and manly style, to imitate in English a bad German model. The American Carlyle tribe imagined they were doing a wise and brilliant thing, by imitating the second-hand absurdities of an imitator, mistaking these borrowed follies for great originalities, and forgetting that affectation is the deadliest poison to the growth of sound literature.

There is another English critic, Macaulay, the great Edinburgh Reviewer, to whom we can refer with more pleasure, in the words of the United States Democratic Review for July, 1844, as probably the most brilliant writer of English prose now living, the last remaining member of that glorious band of wits, critics, and fine thinkers, who constituted the force of the Edinburgh in its prime-Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hazlitt, Brougham, S. Smith, Carlyle, Stephens, and himself: uniting also the fame of a successful politician to that of a splendid periodical writer, he has obtained an accumulation of honors rarely to be met in the person of a single individual. Macaulay's Reviews are the very Iliad and Odyssey of criticism-models of that kind of writing-abler men and deeper scholars have written review articles, yet without that mastery of the art. Hazlitt had a more copious fancy, a richer vein, and