when the French was opening. Shakspeare notoriously died in 1616, when Corneille* was yet a child of ten, and the last of Shakspeare's great contemporary dramatists died, according to my remembrance, in 1636; and, in 1635, one year earlier, was first performed the first successful French tragedy (the "Medea" of Corneille). About seven or eight years after that, the Puritans officially suppressed the English drama by suppressing the theatres. At the opening of the Parliamentary war, the elder (that is the immortal) English drama had finished its career. But Racine, the chief pillar of the French, did not begin until Cromwell was dead and gone, and Charles II. was restored. So here we have the Æsopian fable of the lamb troubling the waters for the wolf, who stood nearer confessedly to the fountain of the stream; or, in the Greek proverb, ano potamon. The other fact is, that as no section whatever of the French literature has ever availed to influence, or in the slightest degree to modify our own, it happens that the dramatic section in particular, which Pope insists on as the galvanizing force operating upon our fathers, has been in the most signal repulsion to our own. All the other sections have been simply inert and neutral; but the drama has ever been in murderous antagonism to every principle and agency by which our own lives and moves.† And

* Hardi, it is scarcely necessary to mention; as he never became a power even in France, and out of France was quite unknown. He coincided in point of time, I believe, most nearly with Francis Beaumont.

+ Italian, Spanish, and finally German poetry have in succession exercised some slight influence, more or less, over our Eng.

to make this outrage upon truth and sense even more outrageous, Pope had not the excuse of those effeminate critics, sometimes found amongst ourselves, who recognize no special divinity in our own drama; that would have been one great crime the more, but it would have been one inconsistency the less. For Pope had been amongst the earliest editors of Shakspeare; he had written a memorable preface to this edition. The edition it is true was shocking; and if the preface even was disfigured by concessions to a feeble system of dramatic criticism, rhetorically it was brilliant with the expression of a genuine enthusiasm as to Shakspeare, and a true sympathy with his colossal power.

4. Yet even this may not be the worst. Even below his deep perhaps there opens a lower deep. I submit that, when a man is asked for a specimen of the Agincourt French literature, he cannot safely produce a specimen from a literature two hundred and fifty years younger without some risk of facing a writ de lunatico inquirendo. Pompey the Pitiful (or if the reader is vexed at hearing him so called, let us call him, with Lord Biron in "Love's Labor's Lost," “more than great, great Pompey, Pompey the Huge") was not published, even in France, until about two

lish poetry. But I have formerly endeavored to show that it is something worse than a mere historical blunder, that, in fact, it involves a gross misconception and a confusion in the understanding, to suppose that there ever has been what has been called a French school in our literature, unless it is supposed that the unimpassioned understanding, or the understanding speaking in a minor key of passion, is a French invention

centuries and a quarter had elapsed from Agincourt. But, as respects England, eighteenpenny Pompey was not yet revealed; the fulness of time for his avatar amongst us did not arrive until something like two hundred and sixty years had winged their flight from Agincourt. And yet Pope's doctrine had been that, in the conquest of France, we English first met with the Prometheus that introduced us to the knowledge of fire and intellectual arts. Is not this ghastly? Elsewhere, indeed, Pope skulks away from his own doctrine, and talks of “correctness as the particular grace for which we were indebted to France. But this will not do. In his own "Art of Criticism," about verse 715, he describes "us brave Britons as incorrigibly rebellious in that particular. We have no correctness, it seems, nor ever had; and therefore, except upon Sir Richard Blackmore's principle of stealing a suit of clothes" from a naked Pict," it is hard to see how we need to thank France for that which, as to us, has no existence. Then, again, Pope acquiesced at other times in an opinion of his early friends, that not Pompey, but himself, was the predestined patriarch of "correctness." Walsh, who was a sublime old blockhead, suggested to Pope that " correctness" was the only tight-rope upon which a fresh literary performer in England could henceforth dance with any advantage of novelty; all other tight-ropes and slack-ropes of every description having been preoccupied by elder funambulists. Both Walsh and Pope forgot ever once to ask themselves what it was that they meant by "correctness; an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside afterwards sternly

ridiculed. Neither of the two literati stopped to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which, by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning,

or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about " correctness" may be, we cannot allow Pope so to escape from his own hyperbolical absurdities. It was not by a little pruning or weeding, that France, according to his original proposition, had bettered our native literature; it was by genial incubation, by acts of vital creation. She, upon our crab-tree cudgel of Agincourt, had engrafted her own peaches and apricots; our sterile thorn France had inoculated with roses. English literature was the Eve that, in the shape of a rib, had been abstracted from the side of the slumbering Pompey - of unconscious Pompey the Huge. And all at the small charge of eighteenpence! O heavens, to think of that! By any possibility that the cost, the total" damage" of our English literature, should have been eighteenpence! that a shilling should be actually coming to us out of half-a-crown!

"Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem."

NOTES.

NOTE 1. Page 1.

"Eminent author:" — Viz., who? On second thoughts, there is no call for secresy; and therefore, in this third edition, I abjure it. The eminent author was Robert Southey; the beautiful but litigious solitude (a valley, to which the only road, far from descending, as in making for a valley it should have done, slowly ascended for miles) was Watenlath, six miles from Keswick, and three from the foot of Lodore Waterfall.

NOTE 2. Page 1.

"Tarn:"-Any small lake among mountains much above the level of the larger lakes, and fed, not (as they are) by one main stream, but by a number of petty rills trickling down the side of the surrounding hills: from the Danish taaren, a trickling. The original word is taar, Danish for a tear. Consequently the notion under which a tarn has been regarded, is that of a weeping from the surrounding cliffs; and this is faithful to that differential feature which I have indicated as distinguishing the tarn from the lake-viz, that the latter is the discharge from a permanent river (or possibly brook), whilst the tarn is simply a rocky basin, into which from its cincture of rocky walls are continually weeping down the rains that wash them forever. Lakers! be thankful to me for solving a question which has hitherto eluded all conjectures. The Danes had a settlement, and have left deep impressions of their language in its old Icelandic form, amongst the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland. The names of the mountains are generally Danish.

NOTE 3. Page 3.

On the expulsion of Edipus from the throne of the Grecian Thebes, his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, succeeded him, under an agreement to reign alternately. Once, however, in possession, the scoundrel Eteocles ignored the compact. His defrauded brother