which I am going to cite first of all revealed to me the
immeasurableness of the morally sublime. What was it,
and where was it? Strange the reader will think it, and
strange* it is, that a case of colossal sublimity should first
emerge from such a writer as Phædrus, the Æsopian fabu-
list. A great mistake it was, on the part of Doctor S.,
that the second book in the Latin language which I was
summoned to study should have been Phædrus
a writer
ambitious of investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness,
of Æsop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But so
it was; and Phædrus naturally towered into enthusiasm
when he had occasion to mention that the most intellectual
of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised
a mighty statue to one who belonged to the same class in
a social sense as himself, viz., the class of slaves, and rose
above that class by the same intellectual power applying
itself to the same object, viz., the moral apologue. These
were the two lines in which that glory of the sublime, so
stirring to my childish sense, seemed to burn as in some
mighty pharos :-

Æsopo statuam ingentem posuere Attici;
Servumque collocârunt eternâ in basi:"

A colossal statue did the Athenians raise to Æsop; and a poor pariah slave they planted upon an everlasting pedestal. I have not scrupled to introduce the word pariah because in that way only could I decipher to the reader by what particular avenue it was that the sublimity which I fancy in the passage reached my heart. This sublimity originated

* '

Strange," &c Yet I remember that, in "The Pursuits of Literature," -a satirical poem once universally famous, the lines about Mnemosyne and her daughters, the Pierides, are cited as exhibiting matchless sublimity. Perhaps, therefore, if carefully searched this writer may contain other jewels not yet appreciated.

in the awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge, between the pollution of slavery, the being a man, yet without right or lawful power belonging to a man, between this unutterable degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when, upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man, the cymbals and kettledrums of kings as drowning the whispers of his ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet joining in one choral gratulation to the regenerated slave. I assign the elements of what I did in reality feel at that time, which to the reader may seem extravagant, and by no means of what it was reasonable to feel. But, in order that full justice may be done to my childish self, I must point out to the reader another source of what strikes me as real grandeur. Horace, that exquisite master of the lyre, and that most shallow of critics, it is needless to say that in those days I had not read. Consequently I knew nothing of his idle canon, that the opening of poems must be humble and subdued. But my own sensibility told me how much of additional grandeur accrued to these two lires as being the immediate and all-pompous opening of the poem. The same feeling I had received from the crashing overture to the grand chapter of Daniel-"Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords." But, above all, I felt this effect produced in the two opening lines of " Macbeth: "

(but watch that an emphasis of thunder dwells upon that

"WHEN
word 'when')-

What an orchestral crash bursts upon the ear in that allshattering question! And one syllable of apologetic prep

aration, so as to meet the suggestion of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating the whole tremendous alarum. The passage in Phædrus differs thus far from that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word ingentem, and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously divided, Esop the slave and the Athenians,

- must be read as an appoggiatura, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the second line-"Servumque collocârunt ETERNA IN BASI." This passage from Phædrus, which might be briefly designated The Apotheosis of the Slave, gave to me my first grand and jubilant sense of the

moral sublime.

Two other experiences of mine of the same class had been earlier, and these I had shared with my sister Elizabeth. The first was derived from the "Arabian Nights." Mrs. Barbauld, a lady now very nearly forgotten,* then

* " Very nearly forgotten." Not quite, however. It must be hard upon eighty or eighty-five years since she first commenced authorship- - a period which allows time for a great deal of forgetting; and yet, in the very week when I am revising this passage, I observe advertised a new edition, attractively illustrated, of the Evenings at Home" - a joint work of Mrs. Barbauld's and her brother's, (the elder Dr. Aikin.) Mrs. Barbauld was exceedingly clever. Her mimicry of Dr. Johnson's style was the best of all that exist. Her blank verse "Washing Day," descriptive of the discomforts attending a mistimed visit to a rustic friend, under the affliction of a family washing, is picturesquely circumstantiated. And her prose hymns for children have left upon my childish recollection a deep impression of solemn beauty and simplicity. Coleridge, who scattered his sneering compliments very liberally up and down the world, used to call the elder Dr. Aikin (allusively to Pope's well. known line

"No craving void left aching in the breast")

filled a la.ge space in the public eye; in fact, as a writer for children, she occupied the place from about 1780 to 1805 which, from 1805 to 1835, was occupied by Miss Edgeworth. Only, as unhappily Miss Edgeworth is also now very nearly forgotten, this is to explain ignotum pèr ignotius, or at least one ignotum by another ignotum. However, since it cannot be helped, this unknown and also most well-known woman, having occasion, in the days of her glory, to speak of the " Arabian Nights," insisted on Aladdin, and, secondly, on Sinbad, as the two jewels of the collection. Now, on the contrary, my sister and myself pronounced Sinbad to be very bad, and Aladdin to be pretty nearly the worst, and upon grounds that still strike. me as just. For, as to Sinbad, it is not a story at all, but a mere succession of adventures, having no unity of interest whatsoever; and in Alladin, after the possession of the lamp has been once secured by a pure accident, the story ceases to move. All the rest is a mere record of upholstery: how this saloon was finished to-day, and that window on the next day, with no fresh incident whatever, except the single and transient misfortune arising out of the advantage given to the magician by the unpardonable stupidity of Aladdin in regard to the lamp. But, whilst my sister and I agreed in despising Aladdin so much as almost to be on the verge of despising the queen of all the bluestockings for so ill-directed a preference, one solitary section there was of that tale which fixed and fascinated my gaze, in a degree that I never afterwards forgot, and did not at that time comprehend. The sublimity which it involved was mysterious and unfathomable as regarded

an aching void; and the nephew, Dr. Arthur Aikin, by way of variety, a void aching; whilst Mrs. Barbauld he designated as that pleonasm of nakedness; since, as if it were not enough to be bare, she was also ald.

any key which I possessed for deciphering its law or origin Made restless by the blind sense which I had of its gran deur, I could not for a moment succeed in finding out why it should be grand. Unable to explain my own impressions in "Aladdin," I did not the less obstinately persist in believing a sublimity which I could not understand. It was, in fact, one of those many important cases which elsewhere I have called involutes of human sensibility; combi nations in which the materials of future thought or feeling are carried as imperceptibly into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried variously combined through the atmosphere, or by means of rivers, by birds, by winds, by waters, into remote countries. But the reader shall judge for himself. At the opening of the tale, a magician living in the central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one made aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp endowed with supernatural powers available for the service of any man whatever who should get it into his keeping. But there lies the difficulty. The lamp is imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, and from these it can be released only by the hands of an innocent child. But this is not enough: the child must have a special horoscope written in the stars, or else a peculiar destiny written in his consti tution, entitling him to take possession of the lamp. Where shall such a child be found? Where shall he be sought? The magician knows: he applies his ear to the earth; he listens to the innumerable sounds of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment are tormenting the surface of the globe; and amongst them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar steps of the child Aladdin. Through this mighty labyrinth of sounds, which Archimedes, aided by his arenarius, could not sum or disentangle, one solitary infant's feet are distinctly recognized on the banks of the