NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

No. CXXIV.

JULY, 1844.

ART. I.The Poets and Poetry of America; an Article in the Foreign Quarterly Review, for January, 1844. London.

THE earliest notices we have of Britain represent it as fruitful in barbarians, tin, and lead. It has continued so ever since. The Greeks knew something of it, but their notions were vague and uncertain; the Phoenicians, who were to the ancients what the American navigators are to the moderns, found out the island, and drove a profitable trade, exchanging trinkets, that always please the fancy of barbarians and children, for the useful metals which their advanced civilization knew how to put to good use. Herodotus is supposed to have included it in his Cassiterides or Tin islands. The barbarous condition of the inhabitants is indicated even by the name, which is derived from the old word brit, meaning painted for they painted their bodies, like the North American Indians.

Cæsar made two expeditions into Britain, as an interlude in his Gallic conquests; and from his graphic pen we have two or three paragraphs describing their manners, that is, all the manners they had; and it is curious to see how many traits are still preserved, in spite of innumerable mutations, and the silent action of more than eighteen centuries. Pecorum, says he, magnus numerus ; they have a vast number of sheep"; they have them now. re utuntur importato; but this at present is unnecessary, as they have brass enough of their own. The ancient Britons thought it im

pious to "taste the hare, the hen, and the goose "; this, with a great many other religious scruples, the modern Britons have thrown off; but they still raise game-cocks, animi voluptatisque causâ, "for the sake of intellectual delight." In Cæsar's time, the seaboard was settled by people who went over from Belgium, prædæ ac belli inferendi causâ; and from these persons came not a little of the partiality for plunder and war, which has ever since been characteristic of the English people. The inhabitants of the interior, he states, fed on milk and flesh, and were clothed with skins. It must be admitted, that, in these respects, a great change has taken place, and for the worse; for, at present, great numbers of the British people are utterly unable to procure milk or flesh, and have no other skins to wear than their own. All the Britons dyed themselves with woad, which produced a blue color, and gave them a more horrible look-a thing quite unnecessary in battle; the cerulean tint is now confined to the females, and its terrors are exhibited only in society. They did not cut the hair or shave the upper lip; and the same fashion exists to the present day among the dandies, who are their most direct descendants. Uxores habent deni duodenique inter se communes; and the records of Doctors' Commons show, that, in these particulars, the English are not a whit behind their barbarous ancestors; nay, the present laws of England carry out the principle, so well stated by the Roman conqueror, si qui sunt ex his nati, eorum habentur liberi, quo primum virgo quæque deducta est.

The poets, especially Virgil and Horace, make frequent allusions to the barbarity of the ancient Britons. Horace talks of bringing them in chains down the Sacred Way; of the remote Britons; of visiting in safety - which he never did the Britons, hospitibus feros, "cruel to strangers"; language prophetic of the manner in which he was long afterwards mutilated by the ferocious Bentley; and, in another place, he hints at turning war, famine, and pestilence against the Persians and Britons, regarding them as equally extreme points from the centre of civilization. Virgil speaks of them as divided from the whole earth; which, in a moral sense, they have continued to be ever since.

Tacitus, in his admirable life of Agricola, gives some interesting notices of this barbarous people. He begins, in

his usual pithy style, by saying, Britanniam qui mortales initio coluerint, indigena an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum compertum. He then mentions the light or red hair of the Caledonians, and their brawny limbs; and, in describing the whole nation, he says, they had the same bravery as the Gauls in demanding to be led into danger, and the same cowardice in running from it when it actually came. Here we see the very germ of John Bull's love of bullying; though candor compels us to confess, that he stands fight a little better now than, according to the great historian, he did in former times. The Britons had a notion, too, that respectability consisted in driving a chariot, honestior auriga; undoubtedly the source of the modern reverence for a coach and six,-a feeling which is very nicely graduated for vehicles of every degree of pretension, down to a gig, constituting what Carlyle very justly calls the "gigmanity" of the British nation. Tacitus proceeds to describe the physical peculiarities of the island, which he does in a masterly manner, and the description is as true to-day, in most particulars, as it was when first written. The Romans, for various reasons, but chiefly because they thought the play was not worth the candle, made but little progress in the conquest, until the enterprise was intrusted to the vigorous genius of Agricola. Even in the time of Quintilian, so little was known of this barbarous dependency, that he expressly affirms, that, in the schools of rhetoric, a common question discussed by the young students as an exercise in elocution was, whether Britain was an island or not; and we are told by no less an authority than a committee of the House of Commons, that precisely the same question being put in the course of their inquiries on the subject of education, many Englishmen, born in the interior probably, exhibited the same geographical uncertainty as formerly existed in the Roman schools.

The early Druidical religion or superstition of these barbarians left its imprint on the national character, and may be traced to the present day. The ancient hierarchy, like the modern, had the exclusive right to teach the doctrines of religion, which they inculcated in verses that sometimes had a hidden meaning; the modern Druids make no verses, and their sermons sometimes have no meaning at all. In other respects, they are very much the same; like their predeces

sors, they utter terrible curses on all who dissent from them; they advocate the keeping of religious knowledge from the people, especially at the great Druidical establishment of Oxford, where the ancient superstitious rites are maintained with a punctilious observance worthy of the darkest ages. They insist on having the exclusive control of the education of the young; and so great is their power, that, under its influence and the terror of their infuriated denunciations, a reformed House of Parliament recently refused to make a grant of money for a system of national education, unless it should be placed entirely under the direction of the modern Druids, the priests of the established church; - so priestridden have the inhabitants of that Tin island been from the days of Cæsar and Tacitus.

Just as Roman civilization had gained a slight foothold in Britain, the disturbances in the empire compelled the government to withdraw their troops, and leave the half reclaimed barbarians to fall back into their aboriginal condition. Their labors of four centuries were thus completely lost; and it is a striking proof of the stupidity of the British race, that, just before the Romans bade a final adieu to Britain, they had to erect anew the wall of Severus, which was built entirely of stone, and which the Britons had not at that time artificers skilful enough to repair." The Britons, then, did not know enough, after some four hundred years of training, to build a stone wall. They have not built many since, but have used hedges, which require less genius, and only need occasionally to be trimmed.

A modern historian judiciously remarks, that "the sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions incident to barbarians are so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty, that they disgust by the uniformity of their appearance; and it is rather fortunate for letters, that they are buried in silence and oblivion." This train of reflections was suggested to his mind by the contemplation of the origines of the English nation; and it has been recalled to ours by the same process. We shall not, therefore, trace the formation of the national character through its successive stages, under the Saxon robbers, the Danish pirates, and the freebooting adventurers from Normandy, all of whom left distinct marks upon the moral development of the Englishman, until at length the constitution as a nonentity, about

which a vast amount of nonsense is dealt out at every session of Parliament, is facetiously termed - was consolidated by the revolution through which the Prince of Orange received the crown; - of whom it was said, by one who knew whereof he spoke, that "the receiver is as bad as the thief."

Of a people descended from such a stock it would be unreasonable to expect either morals, manners, or poetry; and we are not at all surprised or disappointed, therefore, by the unfavorable results of a cursory survey of their literature and their public and private history during the last century or two, and of their condition at the present time. The population of England is made up of masters and serfs, otherwise called the aristocracy and the people; the former being the legitimate, or rather the illegitimate, descendants of the marauding tribes who conquered and settled the country; and the latter being the present representatives of the barbarous and ignorant races who were subjugated by them. No other theory will account for the insufferable arrogance and haughtiness of the higher class, or the tame submissiveness and cringing servility of the inferior tribe. Among no people in the world, excepting perhaps the Hindoos, are the distinctions of caste more rigidly preserved than in Great Britain. Barriers and fences of every sort are multiplied with the most jealous care, to prevent the dreaded effects of a mixture of races; and these obstructions are usually sufficient to preserve the purity of blood from any known and acknowledged contamination, except when a bankrupt man of rank condescends to repair his ruined fortunes by espousing the daughter of a wealthy merchant, or a titled debauchee forms a matrimonial connection with an actress or an operadancer. But usually, a peer and a tradesman, a baronet and a laborer, a country gentleman and one of his tenants, are the representatives respectively of what we might almost call two orders of being. It would be as great a blunder for an Englishman to put the two into the same class, as for a naturalist to place quadrupeds and quadrumani in the same order, or, in other words, to rank together a horse and a monkey. It is difficult to say which of the two persons is the most to be pitied, the one for his overbearing insolence, or the other for the cowed and slavish manner in which he submits to it; the one who browbeats his inferior with every token of lordly and supercilious contempt, or the