]82(i.] ()>i t/ie Drcliiie o/'iJie Brilish Dnnna. 41 



above vulgar use, or it is unfit for tragic poetry. Themes, therefore, 

 wliicli to us are trite and common, had in early times a freshness, a 

 novelty, and a dignity, which nothing but another age of barbarism 

 could now restore. And the events of our own time, which, if intelli- 

 gence could now travel as slowl}-, and undergo in its passage as many 

 changes as among the Greeks and Romans, would furnish the grandest 

 subjects for poets of every class, are hindered from acquiring any ad- 

 dition of the marvellous, and even robbed of their proper meed of 

 wonder, by that most unpoeticul of all innovators — the Press. 



In those rude jjcriods, also, when there was an air of wildness in 

 living characters, and when society, as it existed, presented the moral 

 qualities in their extremes, a poet might have proceeded pretty far 

 without being accused of transgressing truth and nature. His picture 

 miglit have been coloured highly, even for the times in which it was 

 exliibited, and still would not have seemed an improbable represen- 

 tation to the beholders. The severest taste, had it then existed, would 

 Jiave allowed more boldness in writers, than it will admit in a tamer 

 condition of society. The same causes which we have described as 

 giving scope and freedom to the imagination of tlie poet, produced in 

 his audience and readers a relish for his most daring conceptions. 

 Their own sj^mpathies, perhaps their own experience, attested the truth 

 or probability of his representations, and disarmed criticism if it ven- 

 tured to disapprove, by thus w'itnessing against the justness of its stric- 

 tures. All this nourished a fearlessness of censure, without the exist- 

 ence of which, to a certain degree, it is scarcely possible that genius 

 can produce any thing grand or powerful. While the mind pauses to 

 consider the possible fiat of the critic — while the judgment is balancing 

 on the propriety of a thought, which ought to be admitted or dismissed 

 on the first instant of its appearance, the imagination cools ; the happy 

 moment, with its train of splendid visions, passes away ; and when the 

 conceptions are recalled, only a few of them are to be found, and these 

 often languid or lifeless. But the di-ead of criticism is the necessary 

 result of that fastidiousness of taste, which grows up in an age of great 

 civilization, amidst a polished, extended and redundant literature, cir- 

 culated and become fiimiliar among an immense reading public. Such 

 a public not on\y judge more severely than those of an earlier age, but 

 judge according to a different standard: their sympathies and expe- 

 rience are widely dissimilar. We, of the present age, can conceive, 

 generall)^ that our ancestors, t«o or three hundred years ago, gave way 

 to more violent feelings than modern manners would allow ; were less 

 measured than ourselves in their language and conduct; and engaged 

 and succeeded in adventures, which no one in his senses would engage 

 in at the present day. But when we come to particulars, and read of 

 persons and incidents in the works of writers, who formed their notions 

 of character and probability upon an acquaintance with these times, we 

 forget our general notions, or are incapable of applying them ; we judge 

 according to the modes of acting and of thinking pre'.alent in our own 

 days ; and we pronounce the characters unnatural, and tlie fable too 

 marvellous for credible fiction. We cry down, as wild conceits, senti- 

 ments which, in the days they were written, did not perhaps exceed 

 >vhat was really felt and expressed, in situations similar to those in which 

 the poet introduced them. Because a thought seems to us strained and 

 pedantic, we think it could never have been natural ; forgetting that 



M. M. New Series.— Vol. I. No. 1 . G 



