22 OH Reading New Books. JoLV, 



Books have been so multiplied in our days (like the Vanity Fair of 

 knowledge), and we have made such progress beyond ourselves in some 

 points, that it seems at first glance as if we had monopolized every possible 

 advantage, and the rest of the world must be left destitute and in darkness. 

 This is the cockneyism (with leave be it spoken) of the nineteenth century. 

 There is a tone of smartness and piquancy in modern writing, to which 

 former examples may, in one sense, appear flat and pedantic. Our allusions 

 are more pointed and personal : the ancients are, in this respect, formal and 

 prosaic personages. Some one, not long ago, in this vulgar, shallow spirit 

 of criticism (which sees every thing from its own point of view), said that 

 the tragedies of Sophocles and ^Eschylus were about as good as the pieces 

 brought out at Sadler's Wells or the Adelphi Theatre. An oration of 

 Demosthenes is thought dry and meagre, because it is not " full of wise 

 saws and modern instances:" one of Cicero's is objected to as flimsy and 

 extravagant, for the same reason. There is a style in one age which does 

 not fall in with the taste of the public in another, as it requires greater 

 effeminacy and softness, greater severity or simplicity, greater force or 

 refinement. Guido was more admired than Raphael in his day, because 

 the manners were grown softer without the strength : Sir Peter Lely was 

 thought in his to have eclipsed Vandyke an opinion which no one holds 

 at present : Holbein's faces must be allowed to be very different from Sir 

 Thomas Lawrence's yet the oue was the favourite painter of Henry VIII., 

 as the other is of George IV. What should we say in our time to the 

 euphuism of the age of Elizabeth, when style was made a riddle, and the 

 court talked in conundrums ? This, as a novelty and a trial of the wits, 

 might take for a while : afterwards, it could only seem absurd. We must 

 always make some allowance for a change of style, which those who are 

 accustomed to read none but works written within the last twenty years 

 neither can nor will make. When a whole generation read, they will read 

 none but contemporary productions. The taste for literature becomes super- 

 ficial, as it becomes universal and is spread, over a larger space. When ten 

 thousand boarding-school girls, who have learned to play on the harpsichord, 

 are brought out in the same season, Rossini will be preferred to Mozart, as 

 the last new composer. I remember a very genteel young couple in the 

 boxes at Drury Lane being very much scandalized some years ago at the 

 phrase in A New Way to pay Old Debts " an insolent piece of paper" 

 applied to the contents of a letter it wanted the modern lightness and 

 indifference. Let an old book be ever so good, it treats (generally speak- 

 ing) of topics that are stale in a style that has grown u somewhat musty ;" 

 of manners that are exploded, probably by the very ridicule thus cast upon 

 them; of persons that no longer figure on the stage ; and of interests that 

 have long since given place to others in the infinite fluctuations of human 

 affairs. Longinus complains of the want of interest in the Odyssey, because 

 it does not, like the Iliad, treat of war. The very complaint we make 

 against the latter is that it treats of nothing else ; or that, as Fuseli ex- 

 presses it, every thing is seen " through the blaze of war." Books of devo- 

 tion are no longer read (if we read Irvirig's Orations, it is merely that we 

 may go as a lounge to see the man) : even attacks on religion are out of 

 date and insipid. Vol take's jests, and the Jew's Letters in answer (equal 

 in wit, and more than equal in learning), repose quietly on the shelf toge- 

 ther. We want something in England about Rent and the Poor- Laws, and 

 something in France about the Charteror Lord Byron. With the 

 attempts, however, to revive superstition and intolerance, a spirit of oppo- 



