TH

HIS period presents several illustrious names, and accelerated progress in every department of literature. In poetry, the period was preeminently distinguished, and is the only one which challenges comparison, in any degree, with the brilliant Elizabethan age. In fiction, or imaginative invention, the name of Scott is inferior only to that of Shakspeare; in criticism, a new era may be dated from the establishment of the Edinburgh Review; and in historical composition, if we have no Hume or Gibbon, we have the results of valuable and diligent research. Truth and nature have been more truly and devoutly worshipped, and real excellence more highly prized. It has been feared by some that the principle of utility, which is recognised as one of the features of the present age, and the progress of mechanical knowledge, would be fatal to the higher efforts of imagination, and diminish the territories of the poet. This seems a groundless fear. It did not damp the ardour of Scott or Byron, or the fancy of Moore, and it has not prevented the poetry of Wordsworth from gradually working its way into public favour. If we have not the chivalry and romance of the Elizabethan age, we have the ever-living passions of human nature and the wide theatre of the world, now accurately known and discriminated, as a field for the exercise of genius. We have the benefit of all past knowledge and literature to exalt our standard of imitation and taste, and a more sure reward in the encouragement and applause of a populous and enlightened nation. The literature of England,' says Shelley, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among such philos. ophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison

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any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day, without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'