these times, the corresponding literature in the eighteenth century appears insupportably pedantic and tedious. Nobody now reads the Rambler or the Idler; and the colossal réputation of Johnson rests almost entirely upon his profound and caustic sayings recorded in Boswell. Even the Spectator itself, though universally praised, is by no means now generally read; and nothing but the exquisite beauty of some of Addison's papers, prevents the Delias and Lucindas, who figure in its pages, from sinking them in irrecoverable obscurity.

Here then is the marvel of the present time. We have a population, in which, from the rapid extent of knowledge among all classes, a more extended class of readers desiring information is daily arising; in which the great and standard works of literature in theology, philosophy, and history, are constantly issuing in every varied form from the press; in which unparalleled talent of every description is constantly devoted to the prosecution of literature; but in which the new works given forth from the press are, with very few exceptions, frivolous or ephemeral, and the whole serious talents of the nation are turn ed into the perishable channels of the daily, weekly, monthly, or the quarterly press. That such a state of things is anomalous and extraordi. nary, few probably will doubt; but that it is alarming and prejudicial in a national point of view, and may, if it continues unabated, produce both a degradation of the national character, and, in the end, danger or ruin to the national fortunes, though not so generally admitted, is not the less true, nor the less capable of demonstration.

In the first place, this state of things, when the whole talent of the nation is directed to periodical literature, or works of evanescent interest, has a tendency to degrade the national character, because it taints the fountains from which the national thought is derived. We possess, indeed, in the standard literature of Great Britain, a mass of thoughts and ideas which may well make the nation immortal, and which, to the end of time, will constitute the fountains from which grand and generous thoughts will be drawn by all future races of men. But the

existence of these standard works is not enough; still less is it enough in an age of rapid progress and evident transition, such as the present, when new interests are every where arising, new social and political combinations emerging, new national dangers to be guarded against, new national virtues to be required. For a nation in such a state of society to remain satisfied with its old standard literature, and not to aspire to produce any thing which is at once durable and new, is the same solecism as it would be for a man to remain content with a wardrobe of fifty years' standing, and resolutely to resist the introduction of any of the fashions or improvements of later times. A nation which aspires

to retain its eminence either in arts or in arms, must keep a-breast of its neighbours; if it does not advance, it will speedily fall behind, be thrown into the shade, and decline. It is not sufficient for England to refer to the works of Milton, Shakspeare, Johnson, or Scott; she must prolong the race of these great men, or her intellectual career will speedily come to a close. Short and fleeting indeed is the period of transcendant greatness allotted to any nation in any branch of thought. The moment it stops, it begins to recede; and to every empire which has made intellectual triumphs, is prescribed the same law which was felt by Napoleon in Europe and the British in India, that conquest is essential to existence.

But if the danger to our national literature is great, if the intellect and genius of Britain does not keep pace with the high destinies to which she is called, and the unbounded mental activity with which she is surrounded, much more serious is the peril thence inevitably accruing to the national character and the public fortunes. Whence is it that the noble and generous feelings are derived, which in time past have animated the breasts of our patriots, our heroes, and our legislators? Where, but in the immortal pages of our poets, our orators, and historians? What noble sentiments has the air of "Rule Britannia" awakened; how many future Nelsons may the "Mariners of England," or Southey's inimitable "Lives of our Naval Heroes" produce? Sentiments such as these immortal works embody, "thoughts that breathe, and words

that burn," are the true national inheritance; they constitute the most powerful elements of national strength, for they form the character, without which all others are unavailing; they belong alike to the rich and to the poor, to the prince and to the peasant; they form the unseen bond which links together the high and the low, the rich and the poor; and which, penetrating and pervading every class of society, tend both to perpetuate the virtues which have brought us to our present greatness, and arrest the decline, which the influx of wealth, and the prevalence of commercial ideas, might otherwise have a tendency to produce. What would be the effect upon the fortunes of the nation, if this pure and elevated species of literature were to cease amongst us; if every thing were to be brought down to the cheapest market, and adapted to the most ordinary capacity; if cutting articles for reviews, or dashing stories for magazines, were henceforth to form our staple literature; and the race of the Miltons, the Shakspeares, the Grays, and the Campbells, was to perish under the cravings of an utilitarian age? We may safely say that the national character would decline, the national spirit become enfeebled; that generous sentiments would be dried up under the influence of transient excitement, and permanent resolve be extinguished by the necessity of present gain; and that the days of Clive and Wellesley in India, and of Nelson and Wellington in Europe, would be numbered among the things that have been.

But if such dangers await us from the gradual extinction of the higher and nobler branches of our literature, still more serious are the evils which are likely to arise from the termination of the more elevated class of works in history, philosophy, and theology, which are calculated and are fitted to guide and direct the national thought. The dangers of such a calamity, though not so apparent at first sight, are in reality still more serious. For whence is the thought derived which governs the world; the spirit which guides its movements; the rashness which mars its fortunes; the wisdom which guards against its dangers? Whence but from the great fountains of original thought, which are never unlocked in any age but to

the few master-spirits thrown at distant intervals by God among mankind. The press, usually and justly deemed so powerful; the public voice, whose thunders shake the land; the legislature, which embodies and perpetuates by legal force its cravings, are themselves but the reverberation of the thought of the great of the preceding age. The tempests sweep round and agitate the globe; but it is to the wisdom of Juno alone that Eolus opens the cavern of the winds.

This truth is unpalatable to the masses; it is distasteful to legislators; it is irksome to statesmen who conceive they enjoy, and appear to have, the direction of affairs; but it is illus trated by every page of history, and a clear perception of its truth constitutes one of the most essential requisites of wise government. In vain does the ruling power, whether monarchical, aristocratic, or republican, seek to escape from the government of thought: it is itself under the direction of the great intellects of the preceding age. When it thinks it is original, when it is most fearlessly asserting its boasted inherent power of self-government, it is itself obeying the impulse communicated to the human mind by the departed great. All the marked movements of mankind, all the evident turns or wrenches communicated to the current of general opinion, have arisen from the efforts of individual genius. The age must have been prepared for them, or their effect would have been small; but the age without them would never have discovered the light: the reflected sunbeams must have been descending on the mountains, but his earliest rays strike first on the summit.

Who turned mankind from the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, and preserved the primeval simplicity of Christianity from the pernicious indulgences of the Church of Rome, and opened a new era of religious light upon both hemispheres? Martin Luther. Who fearlessly led his trembling mariners across the seemingly interminable deserts of the Atlantic wave, and discovered at length the new world, which had haunted even his infant dreams? Christopher Columbus. Who turned mankind aside from the returning circle of syllogistic argument to the true method of philosophic investigation? Lord Bacon.

Who introduced a new code into the contests of nations, and subjected even the savage passions of war to a humane code? Grotius. The influence of Montesquieu has been felt for above a century in every country of Europe, in social philosophy. Who discovered the mechanism of the universe, and traced the same law in the fall of an apple as the giant orbit of the comets? Sir Isaac Newton. Who carried the torch of severe and sagacious enquiry into recesses of the human mind, and weaned men from the endless maze of metaphysical scepticism? Dr Reid. Who produced the fervent spirit which, veiled in philanthropy redolent of benevolence, was so soon to be extinguished in the blood of the French Revolution? Rousseau and Voltaire. Who discovered the miracle of steam, and impelled civilization, as by the force of central heat, to the desert places of the earth? James Watt. What unheeded power shook even the solid fabric of the British constitution, and all but destroyed, by seeking unduly to extend, the liberties of England? Lord Brougham, and the Edinburgh Reviewers. Whose policy has ruled the commercial system of England for twenty years, and by the false application of just abstract principles overthrew the Whig ministry? Adam Smith. Whose spirit arrested the devastation of the French Revolution, and checked the madness of the English reformers? Edmund Burke. Who is the real parent of the blind and heartless delusions of the New Poor-Law Bill? Malthus. Who have elevated men from the baseness of utilitarian worship to the grandeur of mental elevation? Coleridge and Wordsworth. All these master-spirits, for good or for evil, communicated their own impress to the generation which succeeded them; the seed sown took often many years to come to maturity, and many different hands, often a new generation, were required to reap it; but when the harvest appeared, it at once was manifest whose hand had sown the seed. "Show me what one or two great men, detached from public life, but with minds full, which must be disburdened, are thinking in their closets in this age, and I will tell you what will be the theme of the orator, the study of the philosopher, the staple of the

press, the guide of the statesman, in the next."

Observe, too-and this is a most essential point in the present argument-that all these great efforts of thought which have thus given a mighty heave to human affairs, and, in the end, have fairly turned aside into a new channel even the broad and varied stream of general thought, have been in direct contradiction to the spirit of the age by which they were surrounded, and which swayed alike the communities, the press, and the government, under the influence of which they were placed. Action and reaction appears to be the great law, not less of the moral than the material world; the counteracting principles, which, like the centripetal and centrifugal force in physics, maintain, amid its perpetual oscillation, the general equilibrium of the universe. But whence is to come the reaction, if the human mind is perpetually influenced by the press: it reviews, magazines, and journals, direct and form public opinion: if individual thought is nothing but the perpetual re-echo of what it hears around it? It is in the solitary thought of individual greatness that this is found. It is there that the fountains are unlocked which let in a new stream on human affairs-which communicate a fresh and a purer element to the flood charged with the selfishness and vices of the world; it is there that the counteracting force is found, which, springing from small beginnings, at length converts a world in error. Archimedes was physically wrong, but he was morally right, when he said, "Give me a fulcrum, and I will move the whole earth." Give me the fulcrum of a great mind, and I will turn aside the world.

It is always in resisting, never by yielding to public opinion, that these great master-spirits exert their power. The conqueror, indeed, who is to act by the present arms of men; the statesman who is to sway by present measures the agitated masses of society, have need of general support. Napoleon said truly that he was so long successful, because he always marched with the opinions of five millions of men. But the great intellects which are destined to give a permanent change to thought-which are destined to act generally, not upon the pre

sent but the next generation-are almost invariably in direct opposition to general opinion. In truth, it is the resistance of a powerful mind to the flood of error by which it is surrounded, which, like the compression that elicits the power of steam, creates the moving power which alters the moral destiny of mankind.

Was it by yielding to public opinion that Bacon emancipated mankind from the fetters of the Aristotelian philosophy? Was it by yielding to the Ptolemaic cycles that Copernicus unfolded the true mechanism of the heavens? Was it by yielding to the dogmas of the church that Galileo established the earth's motions? Was it by yielding to the Romish corruptions that Luther established the Reformation? Was it by concession that Latimer aud Ridley "lighted a flame which, by the grace of God, shall never be extinguished?" Was it by conceding to the long-established system of commercial restriction, that Smith unfolded the truths of the wealth of nations?-or by chiming in with the deluge of infidelity and democracy, with which he was surrounded, that Burke arrested the devastation of the French Revolution? What were the eloquence of Pitt, the arms of Nelson and Wellington, but the ministers of those principles which, in opposition to general opinion, he struck out at once, and with a giant's arm? "Genius creates by a single conception; in a single principle, opening, as it were, on a sudden to genius, a great and new system of things is discovered. The statuary conceives a statue at once, which is afterwards slowly executed by the hands of many.'

If such be the vast and unbounded influence of original thought on human affairs, national character, public policy, and national fortunes, what must be the effect of that state of things which goes to check such original conception?-to vulgarize and debase genius, and turn aside the streams of first conception into the old and polluted channels? If the reaction of originality against commonplace-of freedom against servility of truth against falsehood-of experience against speculation-is the great steadying power in human affairs, and

* D'Israeli's Essay on Lit. Char.

the only safe regulator of the oscillations of public thought, what are we to say to that direction of literary effort, and that tendency in the public mind, which evidently tend to express, and may, erelong, altogether extinguish these great and creative conceptions? Yet, that such is the evident tendency of society and public opinion around us, is obvious, and universally observed. "The time has come," says the liberal Bulwer, + "when nobody will fit out a ship for the intellectual Columbus to discover new worlds, but when every body will subscribe for his setting up a steamboat between Dover and Calais. The immense superficies of the public, as it has now become, operates two ways in detracting from the profundity of writers-it renders it no longer necessary for an author to make himself profound before he writes; and it encourages those writers who are profound, by every inducement, not of lucre merely, but of fame, to exchange deep writing for agreeable writing. The voice which animates the man ambitious of wide fame, does not, according to the beautiful line in Rogers, whisper to him, Aspire, but descend.' He must stoop to conquer.' Thus, if we look abroad in France, where the reading public is much less numerous than in England, a more subtle and refined tone is prevalent in literature; while in America, where it is infinitely larger, the literature is incomparably more superficial. Some high-souled literary men, indeed, desirous rather of truth than of fame, are actuated unconsciously by the spirit of the times; but actuated they necessarily are, just as the wisest orator who uttered only philosophy to a thin audience of Sages, and mechanically abandons his refinements and his reasonings, and expands into a louder tone and more familiar manner as the assembly increases, and the temper of the popular mind is insensibly communicated to the mind that addresses it.""There is in great crowds," says Cousin, "an ascendant which is almost magical, which subdues at once the strongest minds; and the same man who had been a serious and instructive professor to a hundred

+ England and English, p. 446.