Britain, nor had the heart of it died in the breasts of its inhabitants. The Task was the first long poem, from the close of Churchill's brilliant, but evanescent career, that awoke wonder, sympathy, and delight by its own ineffable excellence among the reading people of England.

From Cowper may be deduced the commencement of the third great era of modern English literature, since it was in no small measure to the inspiration of his Task that England is indebted, if not for the existence, yet certainly for the character of the new school of poetry, established first at Bristol, and afterward transferred to the Lakes, as scenery more congenial and undisturbed for the exercise of contemplative genius. Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth started almost contemporaneously in the same path to fame. These authors 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. They set forth rural sights and lights-the loves and graces of domestic life-the comforts of our own fireside-the flowery array of meadows--the sparkling vivacity of rivulets, kind intercourse with neighbors, the generous ardor of patriotism, and the gentler emotions of benevolence. But these subjects were, ere long, exhausted, and they gave place to higher, more heroic, and magnificent scenes. Southey, by his marvelous excursions in the regions both of history and of romance—Coleridge, by 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 splendor 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 grand metropolis of the empire, where the brain of a stranger is bewildered amid 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 fairy land of adventure and the landscape gardening of "Capability Brown" were characteristic of the two periods from Spenser to Milton, and from Dryden to Cowper.

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. 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 marvelous has been invented, consisting, not in the exhibition of supernatural incidents or heroes, but in such distortion, high coloring, 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 halfinstructed minds delight. This preposterous effort at display may be traced through every walk of polite literature, and in every channel of publication.

Never was there a time when so great a number of men of extraordinary genius flourished together in Great Britain. As many have existed, and perhaps there may be always an equal quantity of latent capacity; but since the circumstances of no previous

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 narratives 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