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principles of prudence and foresight.' We only differ from our author as to the true application of those principles, which we should prefer directing towards the means of procuring a sufficiency for the maintenance of a family in respectability and comfort, rather than towards the avoidance of the burthen of a family, lest their maintenance should not be procurable. We know where it is said, He feedeth the ravens who call upon him.' And, though blaming as much as any an indolent and careless reliance on Providence, though assenting, in its moral sense, to the truth of 'Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera,'-the prudence' that we recommend, is an active, not a negative one-a judicious struggle against threatening evils, not a cowardly and Fabian retreat before them— a determination to push back by all imaginable means the apparent barrier to our onward progress, not a timid shrinking within ourselves, lest we haply receive a rub or two against it. And since we are quite confident that the barrier is in truth imaginary, or rather conventional, the offspring of our voluntary arrangements, and to be kept at any distance we please-that

spatium Natura beatis

Omnibus esse dedit, si quis cognoverit uti'—

that the foresight of the members of a civilized community, judiciously directed, and uninterfered with by mistaken laws or officious advice, will enable them to procure a plentiful subsistence for all their possible numbers, either from within or without the geographical limits of the district they at present inhabit-we do think it no part of the duty of a Christian minister, to endeavour to give a different direction to the prudence and foresight' of his fellowcitizens, and we are quite sure, that by so doing, he will only be fighting against nature, and must do far more harm than good. By discouraging matrimony, he will probably but encourage illicit indulgence

• Naturam expellas furcâ tamen usque recurret ;'at the very best, he enforces a needless amount of privation, and checks the production of a large increase of human happiness.

The moral tendency, indeed, of this doctrine, we consider indescribably pernicious. By holding out to all, that improvements of any kind are useless, and even mischievous, for that every enlargement of our resources only tends to land us in a larger, it is true, but a more straitened population,' it directly discourages all attempts at the amelioration of our condition, whether public or private; and fosters in all classes a selfish and apathetic indolence, a mean distrust of our own powers, instead of that confident resolution to employ them to the utmost, which, under fair play, is almost certain of overcoming every obstacle. We need

no

no stronger illustration of the proof of this than the book we are reviewing. Here are half-a-dozen resources canvassed for raising the condition of the body of the population-each of them is admitted to be more or less efficacious towards that end, but because it is assumed that there is an ultimate limit to the efficacy of each, they are all dismissed as unprofitable, deceptive, and even hurtful, and we are gravely told to cease our efforts for enlarging our resources, and direct them wholly to limiting our wants!

Again by this doctrine the wealthy and the powerful are completely absolved from the duty of contributing to relieve the distresses of their poorer neighbours, either by direct charity, or a just and wise attention to the economical means for improving their condition; since all such attempts are declared to be not only fruitless but mischievous. It absolutely frees a government from all responsibility for the sufferings of the mass of the community, by throwing the blame entirely on Nature and the improvidence of the poor themselves, and declaring the evil to admit of no remedy from any possible exertions of the legislature. We cannot imagine any theory more destructive than this would be, were it generally received, whether among the higher and more powerful, or the lower classes themselves; and we must consider those who labour to propagate it, though including, we are well aware, many of the most ardent and benevolent philanthropists of the age, to be, unconsciously, the enemies of their kind.

We hope Dr. Chalmers, in particular, will pardon the freedom of our remarks. We cannot sit by in silence and see the weight of his authority and the force of his eloquence exerted on the side of what we consider a most portentous and abominable doctrine. We implore him to re-consider his opinions. The welfare of existing millions-the existence of future myriads, depends on the destruction of the miserable sophism, which lies at the bottom of his whole economical system.

ART. III.-1. Franckii Callinus, sive Quæstionis de Origine Carminis Elegiaci tractatio critica. Altonæ et Lipsiæ. 1829. 2. Poetarum Græcorum Sylloge, curante lo. Fr. Boissonade. Tom. III. Parisiis. 1830.

IN a work lately noticed in this journal it is remarked, with refer

ence to the peculiar character of the Iliad and the Odyssey,— that they may be looked upon as the embodied spirit of heroic poetry in the abstract, rather than as the poems of any particular poet. In them we can discover no peculiarities of thinking or feeling, no system, no caprice. All is wide, diffused, universal, like the primal

light before it was gathered up, and parcelled off into greater and lesser luminaries to rule the day and the night. Look at the difference in this respect between the Homeric and all the Greek poetry of the following ages. It is no longer the muse speaking, but a Theban, or an Athenian, or a Sicilian poet. The Individual appears, the temperament of the man is visible. Poems become unlike each other. As the nation grows older, and the rights of citizens and the habits of civil society become more precisely defined, the poet's compositions are more or less stamped with the mark of his own character; his spirit, in ceasing to be universal, waxes more intense and personal. A man who had not read a line of the works of Milton or Waller, could not fail to perceive distinct authorship in any two pieces that might be selected from their poetry. So it is with the Greek poets after the Homeric age.'

This is substantially true, at least as to the Greeks; and it is curious to trace the truth of it in that remarkable coincidence of chronologic with philosophical classification, which seems to evince an instinctive obedience to this law of progress in the poetic imagination of that people. In Homer-it matters little whether we regard that mystic word as the name of any one transcendant genius, or as the concrete term for the heroic rhapsodies on the tale of Troy divine-in Homer there is no subjectivity or mental selfbeholding whatever: the character of the author is merged in the character of the age; and we see, as it were, a clear and beautiful stream, which reflects the heavens above, and the flowers and the trees and the men upon its banks-everything, indeed, but its own self. With Homer, we may believe, arose with Homer, we are certain, set-the sun of the Greek heroic poetry; all subsequent attempts, though in respect of each other greatly differing in style and merit, failed, totally failed, it must be allowed, to waken the strong and blithesome and music-breathing spirit of the Iliad. The most successful passages in the Orphic Argonautics, in Apollonius, in Nonnus, in Tryphiodorus, &c., are precisely such as differ essentially in kind from the Homeric tone, and which owe their prominence to the very circumstance, that their authors ceased for the moment to study to imitate an inimitable antiquity, and gave vent to their own great talents in the genuine manner and direction of their own age alone. Heroic poetry-the poetry of Homer-could hardly be the spontaneous growth of any subsequent age in Greece: for the spirit of the nation must no doubt have greatly changed with the nearly universal adoption of republican institutions, and have become more and more alien from the temper and feeling of the olden times, in proportion as city habits, city interests, and city pleasures increased in the range

Introductions to the Study of the Greek Poets. By H. N. Coleridge. p. 177.

and

and intensity of their dominion. With the exception of the early European, more especially the Moro-Castilian, feudalism—such as we see it, for example, in that immortal specimen, the poem of the Cid-the world never saw, and in all probability never will see, any other state of society so remarkably favourable to the production of such poetry as that of the Iliad; a state in which a religious, a music and verse-revering barbarism lay interfused, in harmonious contrast, throughout a fierce but honourable, and as yet unhackneyed civilization,

The Homeric hero-"Hews-left no genuine descendants; the Knight, the Campeador, was, we think, in most points his equal, perhaps more than his equal, but he was not of the same kindred; and so much do we think the poetry of the Iliad to have been the untransmissible, incommunicable product of the heroic age, that we almost believe that a poet, who to the splendid chivalry of Scott should add the moral majesty of Wordsworth and the subtile harmonies of Coleridge, would even, in this our day, do greater things with the Morte Arthur, than lay, or could lie, in the power of any Greek, after the Persian invasion, to effect for the Seven before Thebes or the Thessalian Argonauts; and with our conception of the Iliad, even Eschylus was no exception.

Thus the spirit of heroic poetry in the specific guise of epic verse failed in Greece, and for the next three or four centuries the muse took another shape. The primary or mother-form of this second epoch was what we vulgarly call Elegy,-upon the right definition and history of which we shall enter into some details in this article; the later, but subsequently collateral form, was the Ode. It must not, however, be supposed that there was any total break or discontinuance between these two epochs; on the contrary, the connexion between Homer and Pindar, though exquisitely fine, is entire, and the joining links are the warlike strains of Callinus and Tyrtæus. In them we can very distinctly perceive the same old heroic spirit, though narrowed by the feelings of the individual poet, and modified by the exigency of the particular occasion, but not as yet volatilized into the laments of Mimnermus, nor condensed into the passion of Sappho. They are, in truth, specifically neither of the first age, nor the second, but between, and dovetailing with each, on the one hand, recalling, as by an echo, the epic rhapsody that had preceded them, and on the other, breathing an earnest and a prophecy of the lyric hymn which was to follow them. Within this second age, which commences with Callinus, the probable contemporary of Hesiod, and ends with Pindar, we must place the Works and Days,-justly so, we think, upon the ground of the essential character of that poem, although with an apparent anomaly on the score of its measure.

The

The truth is, that between the genuine Hesiod and the Gnomic elegy there is the closest connexion, and his exclusive use of the hexameter only demonstrates his priority in order of time; besides which, we profess to be only marking what may be called the onward steps of the poetic mind of the Greeks, and not taking any account of the miscellaneous mass of heroic verse which grew up, indeed, in abundance on the banks, as it were, of the running stream, the more or less successful fruit either of rhapsodic imitation of Homer, or sometimes of the necessity felt by early philosophy for a popular vehicle of communication, before the introduction, or at least before the familiar use, of compositions in prose. It is with respect to the writings of this age that the lovers of the antique muse of Greece have the heaviest, the most irretrievable losses to deplore; time and barbarism* have here swept away more than their usual share of the great and the beautiful; and when we take up a modern collection, and see what is now left us even of the mightiest of this throng of great poetstheir mutilated vigour, their disjointed melody, their objectless passion-we feel our hearts swell with that melancholy and vexation of spirit, which we know not that the sight of the shattered temples of Athens itself should more worthily call up, than this mournful exhibition of the torsos of Archilochus, of Sappho, and of Simonides!

·

* See the account given by Alcyonius in the person of Leo X. of the solemn burning of sundry Greek poets, in MS., by the Byzantine priests: Audiebam etiam puer,' says Giovanni, ex Demetrio Chalcondyle, Græcarum rerum peritissimo, sacerdotes Græcos tanta floruisse auctoritate apud Cæsares Byzantinos, ut integra (illorum gratia) complura de veteribus Græcis poemata combusserint, imprimisque ea ubi amores, turpes lusus, et nequitia amantium continebantur; atque ita Menandri, Diphili, Apollodori, Philemonis, Alexis fabellas, et Sapphus, Erinnæ, Anacreontis, Mimnermi, Bionis, Alemanis, Alcai carmina intercidisse ;-tum pro his substituta Nazianzeni nostri poemata, quæ, etsi excitent animos nostrorum hominum ad flagrantiorem religionis cultum, non tamen verborum Atticam proprietatem, et Græcæ linguæ elegantiam edocent. Turpiter quidem sacerdotes isti in veteres Græcos malevoli fuerunt, sed integritatis, probitatis, et religionis maximum dedere testimonium.'— De Exilio, p. 69. Gravina says, 'De' lirici (da Pindaro, ed Anacreonte in fuori [?]) non sono a noi rimasi, che pochi frammenti, per essere state da' vescovi e sacerdoti Greci le loro opere bruciate, ed estinte con esse le oscenità e gli amori, che contene vano; in luogo delle quali, con maggior vantaggio della religione, e della pietà, furon sostituiti i poemi di San Gregorio Nazianzeno.'-Ragion Poetica, p. 57.

Foster says, 'It was their piety, not their ignorance, which induced them to burn most of the old lyric poems on account of their impurity. This loss a Christian scholar will hardly object to them.'-Essay on Accent, &c., p. 138. This last sentence is almost the only weak remark in that admirable book, of which Eton might be more proud, and certainly should know more. These pious priests, who must needs burn Mimnermus and Sappho, took very good care not to deprive Christianity of the benefits likely to arise from the preservation of the Lysistrate and the Dialogi Meretricii. The cause of those great men-the Greek exiles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries-Dem. Chalcondyles, Bessarion, Chrysoloras, Lascaris, &c., is not connected with the barbarous bigots who burnt the exquisite strains of poets, the very fragments of whose works modern bishops have rejoiced to illustrate.

The