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Undoubtedly most of these notions were credited and entertained in a much higher degree, in the preceding periods. But the arts of compofition had not then made a fufficient progress, nor would the poets of those periods have managed them with so much address and judgement. We were now arrived at that point, when the national credulity, chaftened by reason, had produced a fort of civilized fuperftition, and left a set of traditions, fanciful enough for poetic decoration, and yet not too violent and chimerical for common fenfe. Hobbes, although no friend to this doctrine, obferves happily, "In a good poem "both judgement and fancy are required; but the fancy muft "be more eminent, because they please for the EXTRAVA"GANCY, but ought not to displease by INDISCRETION "."

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In the mean time the Gothic romance, although somewhat shook by the claffical fictions, and by the tales of Boccace and Bandello, still maintained its ground: and the daring machineries of giants, dragons, and inchanted caftles, borrowed from the magic storehouse of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Taffo, began to be employed by the epic muse. These ornaments have been cenfured by the bigotry of precife and fervile critics, as abounding in whimsical abfurdities, and as unwarrantable deviations from the practice of Homer and Virgil. The author of AN ENQUIRY INTO THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF HOMER is willing to allow a fertility of genius, and a felicity of expreffion, to Taffo and Ariosto; but at the fame time complains, that, " quitting "life, they betook themselves to aerial beings and Utopian. "characters, and filled their works with Charms and Vifions, "the modern Supplements of the Marvellous and Sublime. The "best poets copy nature, and give it such as they find it. When "once they lose fight of this, they write false, be their talents "ever fo great"." But what shall we fay of those Utopians, the Cyclopes and the Leftrigons in the Odyffey? The hippogrif of Ariosto may be opposed to the harpies of Virgil. If leaves f SECT. V. p. 69.

LEVIATH. Part i. ch. viii.

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VOL. III.

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are turned into ships in the Orlando, nymphs are transformed into ships in the Eneid. Cacus is a more unnatural favage than Caliban. Nor am I convinced, that the imagery of Ifmeno's necromantic foreft in the Gierufalemme Liberata, guarded by walls and battlements of fire, is lefs marvellous and fublime, than the leap of Juno's horses in the Iliad, celebrated by Longinus for its fingular magnificence and dignity. On the principles of this critic, Voltaire's Henriad may be placed at the head of the modern epic. But I forbear to anticipate my opinion of a system, which will more properly be confidered, when I come to speak of Spenfer. I muft, however, obferve here, that the Gothic and pagan fictions were now frequently blended and incorporated. The Lady of the Lake floated in the fuite of Neptune before queen Elifabeth at Kenilworth; Ariel affumes the semblance of a fea-nymph, and Hecate, by an easy affociation, conducts the rites of the weird fifters in Macbeth.

Allegory had been derived from the religious dramas into our civil spectacles. The mafques and pageantries of the age of Elisabeth were not only furnished by the heathen divinities, but often by the virtues and vices imperfonated, fignificantly decorated, accurately distinguished by their proper types, and represented by living actors. The antient fymbolical fhews of this fort began now to lofe their old barbarifm and a mixture of religion, and to affume a degree of poetical elegance and precision. Nor was it only in the conformation of particular figures that much fancy was fhewn, but in the contexture of fome of the fables or devices prefented by groupes of ideal perfonages. These exhibitions quickened creative invention, and reflected back on poetry what poetry had given. From their familiarity and public nature, they formed a national taste for allegory; and the allegorical poets were now writing to the people. Even romance was turned into this channel. In the Fairy Queen, allegory is wrought upon chivalry, and the feats and figments of Arthur's round table

ILIAD, V. 770. Longin. §. ix.

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are moralifed. The virtues of magnificence and chastity are here perfonified but they are imaged with the forms, and under the agency, of romantic knights and damfels. What was an afterthought in Tasso, appears to have been Spenfer's premeditated and primary defign. In the mean time, we must not confound these moral combatants of the Fairy Queen with fome of its other embodied abstractions, which are purely and profeffedly allegorical.

It may here be added, that only a few critical treatifes, and but one ART OF POETRY, were now written. Sentiments and images were not abfolutely determined by the canons of compofition nor was genius awed by the confciousness of a future and final arraignment at the tribunal of taste. A certain dignity of

inattention to niceties is now visible in our writers. Without too closely confulting a criterion of correctness, every man indulged his own capricioufnefs of invention. The poet's appeal was chiefly to his own voluntary feelings, his own immediate and peculiar mode of conception. And this freedom of thought was often expreffed in an undisguised frankness of diction. A circumftance, by the way, that greatly contributed to give the flowing modulation which now marked the measures of our poets, and which foon degenerated into the opposite extreme of diffonance and afperity. Selection and discrimination were often overlooked. Shakespeare wandered in pursuit of universal nature. The glancings of his eye are from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. We behold him breaking the barriers of imaginary method. In the fame scene, he defcends from his meridian of the noblest tragic fublimity, to puns and quibbles, to the meanest merriments of a plebeian farce. In the midst of his dignity, he resembles his own Richard the second, the skipping king, who fometimes discarding the state of a monarch,

Mingled his royalty with carping fools ".

FIRST P. HENRY iv. Act iii. Sc. ii.

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He seems not to have seen any impropriety, in the most abrupt tranfitions, from dukes to buffoons, from fenators to failors, from counsellors to conftables, and from kings to clowns. Like Virgil's majestic oak,

Quantum vertice ad auras

Etherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit'.

No Satires, properly so called, were written till towards the latter end of the queen's reign, and then but a few. Pictures drawn at large of the vices of the times, did not suit readers who loved to wander in the regions of artificial manners. The Mufe, like the people, was too folemn and referved, too ceremonious and pedantic, to stoop to common life. poetry of a nation highly polished.

Satire is the

The importance of the female character was not yet acknowledged, nor were women admitted into the general commerce of fociety. The effect of that intercourse had not imparted a comic air to poetry, nor foftened the feverer tone of our verfification with the levities of gallantry, and the familiarities of compliment, fometimes perhaps operating on serious subjects, and imperceptibly spreading themselves in the general habits of style and thought. I do not mean to infinuate, that our poetry has fuffered from the great change of manners, which this affumption of the gentler fex, or rather the improved state of female education, has produced, by giving elegance and variety to life, by enlarging the sphere of converfation, and by multiplying the topics and enriching the stores of wit and humour. But I am marking the peculiarities of compofition: and my meaning was to fuggeft, that the absence of fo important a circumftance from the modes and constitution of antient life, must have influenced the cotemporary poetry. Of the state of manners among our ancestors respecting this point, many traces remain. Their style of courtship may be collected from the love-dialogues of Hamlet, young

i GEORG. ii. 291.

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Percy, Henry the fifth, and Master Fenton. Their tragic heroines, their Desdemonas and Ophelias, although of so much confequence in the piece, are degraded to the back-ground. In comedy, their ladies are nothing more than MERRY WIVES, plain and chearful matrons, who ftand upon the chariness of their honefty. In the smaller poems, if a lover praises his mistress, she is complimented in strains neither polite nor pathetic, without elegance and without affection: fhe is described, not in the address of intelligible yet artful panegyric, not in the real colours, and with the genuine accomplishments, of nature, but as an eccentric ideal being of another system, and as inspiring sentiments equally unmeaning, hyperbolical, and unnatural.

All or most of these circumstances, contributed to give a descriptive, a picturesque, and a figurative caft to the poetical language. This effect appears even in the profe compofitions of the reign of Elifabeth. In the subsequent age, prose became the language of poetry.

In the mean time, general knowledge was encreasing with a wide diffusion and a hafty rapidity. Books began to be multiplied, and a variety of the most useful and rational topics had been difcuffed in our own language. But fcience had not made too great advances. On the whole, we were now arrived at that period, propitious to the operations of original and true poetry, when the coyness of fancy was not always proof against the approaches of reason, when genius was rather directed than governed by judgement, and when taste and learning had so far only disciplined imagination, as to fuffer its exceffes to pafs. without cenfure or controul, for the fake of the beauties to which they were allied.

END OF THE THIRD VOLUME.

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