dence of their standing in the general estimation of the world.

I am not sure that the foundation of this mistrust is not a consciousness of how greatly they have failed to come up to their own ideas of excellence. Such men have formed a high standard of merit; they have a keen perception of their own deficiencies, and they are apt to imagine that every other person not only has the same standard, but can discern, with as much perspicacity, the vast interval which separates what they are from what they ought to be.

Farewell.

F. R.

LETTER XIV.

Contrast of former with present Times-Inquiry whether our Age is less Poetical than its Predecessors-Effect of Time on our estimate of Literary Compositions-Prevalence of Reading in modern Days.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I mentioned in a preceding letter that I had been amusing myself with Ivanhoe. On closing the last volume, I took up a London newspaper, and I could not help being struck with the vast change which has supervened in the manners and habits of the people of England. In the one age we have battles and tournaments, lords and vassals, monks and nuns and abbeys, outlaws and forests, wild and pathless moors, rude and gloomy castles; in the other, political associations and joint-stock compa nies, merchants and lawyers, engineers and mechanics, Methodist meeting-houses and manufactories, roads and canals, elegant villas and splendid mansions, amidst a country presenting

the aspect of one continuous garden. The banditti or forest-robbers have been superseded by poachers, pick-pockets, and swindlers. Instead of wandering minstrels, we have itinerant lecturers-public meetings instead of mock-battles and eloquence instead of agility and prowess.

I mention merely a few points of difference: to enumerate all, would be a description of almost all the customs and institutions of the country. In contrasting these two states of society, we are apt to have a feeling of dulness, sameness, and lowness, when we consider our own. It seems to partake too much of mechanical existence; to have too little in it of a character to excite the imagination. The past age, on the other hand, teems with romance: all its incidents are tinged with the visionary hues of association : we are roused into a fervour by the ideas of knights and castles and abbeys, and all that belongs to a state of society of which nothing but a scanty record now remains. Hence we are apt to infer that our own age is less poetical than its predecesThere are two ways, however, in which Was a former age

sors.

this may be understood.

more poetical to the persons who lived in it, or is it only more poetical to us?

A little consideration will probably show that it is true only in the last sense; that the effect is to be attributed to the associations superinduced upon the mind by the lapse of time; and that, to the inhabitants of any country, and the people of any age, their manners, customs, and institutions, are much the same common every-day things, possessing little power to awaken the imagination. That which is familiar can never induce this kind of excitation, which implies room for conjecture and invention. When we see an object perfectly, and can examine it on all sides, our minds are tied down to the actual fact: there is neither opportunity nor inducement to go beyond it. Place the object at a distance, and exhibit only a part; and the imaginative faculty starts into immediate alertness.

Many of the objects of common life are associated, too, with low and disagreeable ideas. Manufactories and meeting-houses, made up of red bricks and blue tiles, for instance, present scenes not of the choicest sort, and calculated to awaken any thing but those

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poetical conceptions which gather round Kenilworth Castle or Fountain's Abbey; and yet it is not impossible that, in a future state of society, a description of them, as they now exist, may be employed by some master of the lyre with powerful effect on the imaginations of his readers. The author of Waverley has known how to invest the squabbles of the apprentices in London with something like historical interest; and even the Jew of former times, whose profession of usurer must always in actual life have connected ideas of sordidness and meanness with his appearance, passes over the stage of the same author surrounded with a halo of exciting associations.

Only think how, after the lapse of a thousand or two thousand years, the imagination will be inflamed by the age of George the Third! What a picturesque, poetical, and visionary sort of age, it will appear to the poets and novelists of the year 4000! What a hoary mist will be diffused over our present language. What nature and freshness and purity will be discovered in the expressions of these good old times, compared to the tasteless verbiage, forced slang, and exotic phrases, of the forty