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achieved established reputations, were justly considered the 

 minor poets of the day, or to criticise or contrast their per- 

 formances, but rather to produce, in the illustrations he should 

 offer, evidence of the existence of much poetry, many smaller 

 pieces of verse, floating on the surface of our periodical litera- 

 ture, which the world ought not willingly to let die, contain- 

 ing, as they did, whether the themes were of sadness, 

 gaiety, or gloom, essential beauties, and which, if preserved, 

 might become permanently popular; " for though," Lord Jeffrey 

 says, " the vivat of public opinion be generally oracular, its 

 "pereat appears to us to be often sufficiently capricious j and 

 " while we would foster all that it bids to live, we would wil- 

 " lingly revive much that it leaves to die." 



However difficult it might be to give an exact definition of 

 Poetry, such as should include all that essentially belonged to 

 it, and exclude all that was foreign, or accidental, he appre- 

 hended there could be no doubt that what we understood by 

 the term Poetry, had been in all nations antecedent to Prose, 

 and that the earliest Authors were the Bards or Bhapsodists ; 

 scarcely, if indeed ever, did we find an age so dark, or a people 

 so barbarous, as not to have possessed Bards or Minstrels to. 

 sing or sound the praises of their heroes; in' after centuries 

 we found the mantle of the Bard descending on the Ballad- 

 writer; and it was hardly necessary to cite the oft-quoted 

 dictum of Cardinal Mazarin— " Let me make the ballads of a 

 " country and I care not who makes its laws" — to prove the 

 immense influence that the ballad-poetry of by-gone times 

 then exercised over the minds of the mass of the community; — 

 as with our forefathers, so with ourselves, though the disco- 

 very of printing, and the consequent wide circulation of that 

 wonderful engine of modern times, the newspaper, and of late 

 years its still more generally extended diffusion through the re- 

 duction of the stamp-duty, coupled with the vast and never- 

 ceasing issue of cheap and excellent periodical literature, leading 

 and improving the public mind, made us demand and be satis- 



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