#130} 
to open for us the route. The great 
views of nature will sooner or later 
be accomplished, . 
- For the same reason that she gives 
mountains a gentle slope, to allow 
a free access to them, and facilitate 
the entrance into the yallies, she 
has distributed in all directions a 
profusion of rivers and seas; every 
thing announces a circulation simi- 
lar to that in the human body. She 
therefore ‘wills, that all the people 
of the earth should be knit by the 
bonds of union, but without clash- 
ing suddenly, and being too readily 
blended. Thus, by extending and 
connecting our various branches of 
knowledge, we shall find that they 
all tend to the improvement of the 
human species ; and in this view art 
is nature. — 
On Didactic Poetry; from a critical 
Essay on Akenside’s Pleasures of the 
Imagination, by Mrs. Barbauld. 
IDACTIC or preceptive poetry 
seems to include a solecism, 
for the end of poetry is to please, 
and of didactic precept the object 
is instruction. Itis however a spe- 
cies of poetry which has been cul- 
tivated from the earliest stages of 
society ; at first, probably, for the 
simple purpose of retaining, by means 
of the regularity of measure, and the 
charms of harmony, the precepts of 
agricultural wisdom, and the apho- 
risms of economical experience. 
When poetry came to be cultivated 
for its own sake, it was natural to 
esteem the didactic, asin that view 
it certainly is, as a speciesof inferior 
merit, compared with those which 
are more peculiarly the work of ima- 
gination; and accordingly in the 
ANNUAL REGISTER, 1795. 
more splendid era of our own poetry 
it has been much less cultivated than 
many others. Afterwards, when 
poetry was become an art, and the 
more obvious sources of description 
and adventure were in some measure 
exhausted, the didactic was resorted 
to, as affording that novelty and va~ 
riety -which began to be the great 
desideratum in works of fancy. 
This species of writing 1s like- 
wise favoured by the diffusion of 
knowledge, by which many sub- 
jects become proper for general 
reading which, in a less informed 
state ofsociety, would bave savoured 
of pedantry and abstruse specula- 
tion : for poetry cannot descend to 
teach the elements of any art or 
science, or confine itself to that res 
gular arrangement and clear brevity 
which suit the communication of un- 
known truths. In fact, the muse 
would make a very indifferent school 
mistress, 
Whoever, therefore, readsa di- 
dactic poem ought to come to it with 
a previous knowledge of his subject ; 
and whoever writes one, ought to 
suppose such a knowledge in his 
readers. If he is obliged to explain 
technical terms, to refer continually 
to critical notes, and to follow a sys- 
tem step by step with the patient 
exactness of a teacher, his poem, 
however laboured, will be a bad 
poem. His office is rather to throw 
a lustre on such prominent parts of 
his system as are most susceptible of 
poetical ornament, and to kindle 
the enthusiasm of those feelings 
which the truths he is conversant 
with are fitted to inspire. In that 
beautiful poem, the Essay on Man, 
the system of the author, ifin reality 
he had any system, is little attended 
to, but those passages which eines 
4 , the 
