own, he seldom fails to make himself ridiculous. Witness the following bit of philosophico-critical cant, on the subject of the lost treasures of literature:

"I believe that a philosopher would consent to lose any poet to regain an historian. Nor is this unjust; for some future poet may arise to supply the vacant place of a lost poet, but it is not so with the historian. Fancy may be supplied, but truth, once lost in the annals of mankind, leaves a chasm never to be filled."-Curiosities.

I believe it would be difficult to crowd into the limited compass of six lines such another combination of ignorance, absurdity, unfounded assumption, false induction, vitiated taste, and sentimental cant, as is exhibited in the above passage. Did D'Israeli weigh the sentiments of philosophers in the circumscribed scale of his own mind? Or was he ignorant of the fact, that there is a greater sympathy between Philosophy and Poetry than between Philosophy and History; and that a true philosopher would not give up one of our great poets for all the historians that ever lived?" Some future poet may arise to supply the place of the lost poet, but it is not so with the historian." Let us suppose such a poet as Homer, or Virgil, or Dante, or Shakspeare, to be irretrievably lost; how soon does D'Israeli think that such another would arise to fill his place? Is our philosopher aware that every great nation is capable, at any stage of its

progress, of producing great historians; and that it is seldom vouchsafed to any nation, during the whole of its progress, to produce a great poet? At this day (1849) Britain can boast the possession of five of her greatest historians, while she can scarcely exhibit so much as the shadow of a great poet. As a climax to this cant we have a contrast between "Fancy" and the "truth of History." It seems never to have occurred to D'Israeli that history is, in general, but a tissue of fables: that the best of it is that which is most remote from truth: that poetry, on the other hand, is necessarily true: that it is good, better, best, in proportion to the amount of truth it reveals that (Holy Writ apart), it is the only unadulterated truth under the sun. There is more truth in one line of the "Iliad" than in the whole of the "Cyropædia ;" in one passage of Shakspeare than in Hume and Smollett together.

The eloquent language of D'Alambert, when speaking of Richardson as a romance writer, is applicable to the great poet :—

:

"I dare pronounce that the most veritable history is full of fictions and thy romances full of truths. History paints some individuals thou paintest the human species. History attributes to some individuals what they have neither said nor done all that thou attributest to man, he has said and done. History embraces but a portion of duration, a point on the surface of the globe: thou hast embraced all spaces and all times."

::

But we need not have recourse to the enthusiasm of a foreigner for the refutation of D'Israeli's paradox. Walter Savage Landor, a writer of the highest intellectual range, has given us, in the following words, his estimate of the truth of history :—

"We make a bad bargain when we exchange poetry for truth in the affairs of ancient times, and by no means a good one in any."-Pericles and Aspasia.

And again :

Perhaps at no time will there be written, by the most accurate and faithful historian, so much of truth as untruth." -Ibid.

To these I shall add the testimony of a writer of very little weight in my judgment, but whose authority is of great value in the eyes of D'Israeli: "Memoirs are often dictated by the fiercest spirit of personal rancour, and then histories are composed from memoirs. Where is the truth ?" -This writer is no other than Isaac D'Israeli himself, but Isaac D'Israeli uninfluenced by the spirit of cant.

In the foregoing remarks I have endeavoured to sketch the condition of criticism in the nineteenth century. Of its unsettled state, its contradictory decisions, and its utter worthlessness as a criterion of public taste, the reader will be able to judge by a few samples from the great masters of the art. I shall first give the name

of the author criticised, and then the judgments and names of the critics.

Sir Walter Scott.

"Scotland is proud of her great national minstrel; and as long as she is Scotland will wash and warm the laurels round his brow with rains and winds that will ever keep brightening their glossy verdure. The truth is, that Scotland had forgotten her own history, till Sir Walter burnished it all up till it glowed again-it is hard to say whether in his poetry or in his prose the brightest—and the past became the present. Scott brought his power to bear on his own people, and has achieved an immortal triumph."- WILSON. Recreations of Christopher

North.

“There is something meretricious in Sir Walter's ballad rhymes. There is a glittering veil thrown over the features of Nature and of old Romance. The details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place. Sir Walter has either not the faculty or not the will to impregnate his subject by an effort of pure invention. The exécution also is much upon a par with the more ephemeral effusions of the press. It is light, agreeable, effeminate, diffuse. As to the rest, and compared with true and great poets, our Scottish minstrel is but a 'metre ballad-monger.' The definition of his poetry is pleasing superficiality. We would rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord Byron's 'Heaven and Earth,' or one of Wordsworth's fancies and goodnights, than all his epics."-HAZLITT. The Spirit of the Age.

William Wordsworth.

"In describing external Nature as she is, no poet perhaps has excelled Wordsworth-not even Thomson: in embuing her and making her pregnant with spiritualities, till the

mighty mother teems with beauty far more beauteous than ever she had rejoiced in till such communion-he excels all the brotherhood. Therein lies his especial glory, and therein the immortal evidences of the might of his creative imagination. The 'Excursion' is a series of poems all swimming in the light of poetry; some of them sweet and simple; some elegant and graceful; some beautiful and most lovely; some of strength and state; some majestic; some magnificent ; some sublime."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North.

"The Excursion' is longer, weaker, and tamer than any of Mr. Wordsworth's other productions, with less boldness of originality and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered so prettily in the Lyrical Ballads between silliness and pathos. The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly, we should characterise as a tissue of moral and devotional ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple and familiar ideas; but with such an accompaniment of long words, long sentences, and unwieldy phrases, and such a hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical sublimities, that it is often difficult for the most skilful and attentive student to obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning- and altogether impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about. It abounds in mawkish sentiment, inflated description, and details of preposterous minuteness; in truisms, cloudy, wordy, and inconceivably prolix; in rapturous mysticism, mock majesty, and solemn verbosity; in revolting incongruities, and an utter disregard of probability or nature; in puerile singularity, and an affected passion for simplicity and for humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste for mystical refinements and all the gorgeousness of obscure phraseology."—JEFFREY. Essays.

Samuel Rogers.

"There is the 'Pleasures of Memory '—an elegant, graceful, beautiful, pensive, and pathetic poem, which it does one's eyes good to gaze on, one's ears good to listen to, one's very