of constant consideration, and Pope's principles of correctness in versification find a counterpart in the rules of painting elaborated by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses' to the Royal Academy. In second-rate artists and writers this strict attention to propriety often leads, no doubt, to stiffness and bombast, but even in them it acts as a salutary preventive against vulgarity, obscurity, and inaccuracy of expression. III. WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY. Not that I think the amiable bard of Rydale shows judg ment in choosing such subjects as the popular mind cannot sympathize in. I do not compare myself in point of imagination with Wordsworth, far from it; for his is naturally exquisite, and highly cultivated from constant exercise. But I cry no roast-meat. There are times a man should remember what Rousseau used to say: 'Tais-toi, Jean Jacques, car on ne t'entend pas.' . . . The error is not in you yourself receiving deep impressions from slight hints, but in supposing that precisely the same sort of impressions must rise in the minds of men, otherwise of kindred feeling; or that the commonplace folk of the world can derive such inductions at any time or under any circumstances.-Scott's Journal, January 1, 1827. In the last paper I said that one of the most marked features of the imaginative genius of the eighteenth century was its limitation. When the range of thought and feeling in the 'Canterbury Tales,' the 'Faery Queen,' Shakespeare's plays, and ' Paradise Lost,' is compared with the subject matter of Dryden and Pope's satires, of the Vanity of Human Wishes,' the 'Elegy in 6 a Country Churchyard,' the Bard,' and the Progress of Poesy,' the Odes on Liberty,' and the Passions,' the Deserted Village,' and the 'Traveller,' everyone must perceive within how narrow a tract the imagination of the later period is circumscribed, and that the mines of poetry which the region contains, though precious, are not inexhaustible. The causes of this limitation are readily discoverable by the light of history. Chaucer had at his disposal all the resources of a social system highly stimulative to the imagination, which was not peculiar to one country, but prevailed over the whole of Europe. His successors, after the period of the Reformation, drew inspiration from still deeper wells. With minds dramatically excited by the spirit of religious liberty and by ardent patriotism, they employed the materials afforded by the still vivid traditions of romantic chivalry, together with the wealth of ideas and the beauty of form discovered in the revival of classical letters. All these opposite veins of thought may easily be detected in the wonderfully compounded work |