before us, in what has received the sanction of time and the concurring testimony of disinterested judges, are we to believe all of a sudden that excellence has started up in our own times, because it never existed before: are we to take the Artists' own word for their superiority to their predecessors? There is one other plea made by the moderns, that they must live,' and the answer to it is, that they do live. An Academician makes his thousand a-year by portraitpainting, and complains that the encouragement given to foreign Art deprives him of the means of subsistence, and prevents him from indulging his genius in works of high history,-playing at will his virgin fancies wild.'

As to the comparative merits of the ancients and the moderns, it does not admit of a question. The odds are too much in favour of the former, because it is likely that more good pictures were painted in the last three hundred than in the last thirty years. Now, the old pictures are the best remaining out of all that period, setting aside those of living Artists. If they are bad, the Art itself is good for nothing; for they are the best that ever were. They are not good, because they are old; but they have become old, because they are good. The question is not between this and any other generation, but between the present and all preceding generations, whom the Catalogue-writer, in his misguided zeal, undertakes to vilify and 'to keep under, or hold up to derision.' To say that the great names which have come down to us are not worth any thing, is to say that the mountain-tops which we see in the farthest horizon are not so high as the intervening objects. If there had been any greater painters than Vandyke or Rubens, or Raphael or Rembrandt, or N. Poussin or Claude Lorraine, we should have heard of them, we should have seen them in the Gallery, and we should have read a patriotic and disinterested account of them in the Catalogue Raisonné. Waiving the unfair and invidious comparison between all former excellence and the concentrated essence of it in the present age, let us ask who, in the last generation of painters, was equal to the old masters? Was it Highmore, or Hayman, or Hudson, or Kneller? Who was the English Raphael, or Rubens, or Vandyke, of that day, to whom the Catalogue-critic would have extended his patriotic sympathy and damning patronage? Kneller, we have been told, was thought superior to Vandyke by the persons of fashion whom he painted. So St. Thomas Apostle seems higher than St. Paul's while you are close under it; but the farther off you go the higher the mighty dome aspires into the skies. What is become of all those great men who flourished in our own time-like flowers in men's caps, dying or ere they sicken '-Hoppner, Opie, Shee, Loutherbourg, Rigaud, Romney,

Barry, the painters of the Sackmere Galery? Gone to the vack of at the Capuiens,' and ther pictures with them, or before them! Shall we put more fun in their succesors? Soal we take the words of their friends for their take and perious? No, we will stick to whe we kov vi ndo a te berooms" of the An, the Black Maners. The picture, for instance, of Charles & on horseback, which our critic criticises with such heavy drouery, is worth all the pictures that were ever exhibited & the Roy Academy (from the time of Sir Joshua to the present tine inclusive, put together. It shews more knowledge and feeling of the An, more skill and beauty, more sense of what it is in objects that gives pleasure to the eye, with more power to communicate this pleasure to the world. If either this single picture, or all the lumber that has ever appeared at the Academy, were to be destroyed, there could not be a question which, with any Artist or with any judge or lover of Art. So stands the account between ancient and modern Art! By this we may judge of all the The Catalogue-writer makes some strictures in the second part on the Waterloo Exhibition, which he does not think what it ought to be. We wonder he had another word to say on modern Art after seeing it. He should instantly have taken the resolution of lago, From this time forth I never will speak more.'

rest.

The writer of the Catalogue Raisonné has fallen foul of two things which ought to be sacred to Artists and lovers of Art-Genius and Fame. If they are not sacred to them, we do not know to whom they will be sacred. A work such as the present shews that the person who could write it must either have no knowledge or taste for Art, or must be actuated by a feeling of unaccountable malignity towards it. It shews that any body of men by whom it could be set on foot or encouraged are not an Academy of Art. It shews that a country in which such a publication could make its appearance is not the country of the Fine Arts. Does the writer think to prove the genius of his countrymen for Art by proclaiming their utter insensibility and flagitious contempt for all beauty and excellence in the art, except in their own works? No! it is very true that the English are a shopkeeping nation; and the Catalogue Raisonné is the proof of it.

Finally, the works of the moderns are not, like those of the Old Masters, a second nature. Oh Art, true likeness of nature, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast,' of what would our Catalogue-mongers deprive us in depriving us of thee and of thy glories, of the lasting works of the great Painters, and of their names no less magnificent, grateful to our hearts as the sound of celestial harmony from other spheres, waking around us

(whether heard or not) from youth to age, the stay, the guide and anchor of our purest thoughts; whom, having once seen, we always remember, and who teach us to see all things through them; without whom life would be to begin again, and the earth barren; of Raphael, who lifted the human form half way to heaven; of Titian, who painted the mind in the face, and unfolded the soul of things to the eye; of Rubens, around whose pencil gorgeous shapes thronged numberless, startling us by the novel accidents of form and colour, putting the spirit of motion into the universe, and weaving a gay fantastic round and Bacchanalian dance with nature; of thee, too, Rembrandt, who didst redeem one half of nature from obloquy, from the nickname in the Catalogue, smoothing the raven down of darkness till it smiled,' and tinging it with a light like streaks of burnished ore; of these, and more, of whom the world is scarce worthy; and what would they give us in return? Nothing. W. H.

No. 37.] ON POETICAL VERSATILITY [Dec. 22, 1816.

THE spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty: but, we suspect, not when its aid is most wanted. The spirit of poetry is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom. Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is for that reason very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry, like law, is a fiction, only a more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties where they do not exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether they exist or not. It is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making, but soars above all obstacles. It cannot be constrained by mastery.' It has the range of the universe; it traverses the empyrean, and looks down on nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its element the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of a dazzling brightness, heaven's own tinct,' and the least soil upon them shews to disadvantage. Sullied, degraded as we have seen it, we shall not insult over it, but leave it to Time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself. Being so majestical, we should do it wrong to offer it the show of violence." But the best things, in their abuse, often become the worst; and so it is with poetry when it is diverted from its proper end. Poets live in an ideal world, where they make everything out according to their

wishes and fancies. They either find things delightful or make them They feign the beautiful and grand out of their own minds, and imagine all ings to be, not wint they are, but what they ought to be. They are naturally investors, creators of truth, of love, and beauty: and while they speak to us from the sacred shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the pure treasures of thought to the world, they cannot be too much admired and applauded: but when, fogetting their high calling, and becoming tools and puppets in the hands of power, they would pass off the gewgaws of corruption and love-tokens of self-interest as the gifts of the Muse, they cannot be too much despised and shunned. We do not like novels founded on facts, nor do we like poets turned courtiers. Poets, it has been said, succeed best in fiction: and they should for the most part stick to it. Invention, not upon an imaginary subject, is a lie: the varnishing over the vices or deformities of actual objects is hypocrisy. Players leave their finery at the stage-door, or they would be hooted; poets come out into the world with all their bravery on, and yet they would pass for bona fide persons. They lend the colours of fancy to whatever they see: whatever they touch becomes gold, though it were lead. With them every Joan is a lady; and kings and queens are human. Matters of fact they embellish at their will, and reason is the play-thing of their passions, their caprice, or their interest. There is no practice so base of which they will not become the panders: no sophistry of which their understanding may not be made the voluntary dupe. Their only object is to please their fancy. Their souls are effeminate, half man and half woman:—they want fortitude, and are without principle. If things do not turn out according to their wishes, they will make their wishes turn round to things. They can easily overlook whatever they do not like, and make an idol of any thing they please. The object of poetry is to please: this art naturally gives pleasure, and excites admiration. Poets, therefore, cannot do well without sympathy and flattery. It is accordingly very much against the grain that they remain long on the unpopular side of the question. They do not like to be shut out when laurels are to be given away at Court-or places under Government to be disposed of, in romantic situations in the country. They are happy to be reconciled on the first opportunity to prince and people, and to exchange their principles for a pension. They have not always strength of mind to think for themselves, nor courage enough to bear the unjust stigma of the opinions they have taken upon trust from others. Truth alone does not satisfy their pampered appetites without the sauce of praise. To prefer truth to all other things, it requires that the mind should have been at some pains in finding it

out, and that we should feel a severe delight in the contemplation of truth, seen by its own clear light, and not as it is reflected in the admiring eyes of the world. A philosopher may perhaps make a shift to be contented with the sober draughts of reason: a poet must have the applause of the world to intoxicate him. Milton was, however, a poet, and an honest man; he was Cromwell's secretary.

T. T.

[JAN. 5, 1817.

No. 38.] ON ACTORS AND ACTING PLAYERS are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time'; the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. To-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter's call, they wear the livery of other men's fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own. They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at secondhand in them: they shew us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. The stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and, indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. How many fine gentlemen do we owe to the stage? How many romantic lovers are mere Romeos in masquerade? How many soft bosoms have heaved with Juliet's sighs? They teach us when to laugh and when to weep, when to love and when to hate, upon principle and with a good grace! Wherever there is a play-house, the world will go on not amiss. The stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue on the mind by first softening the rude materials of which it is composed, by a sense of pleasure. It regulates the passions by giving a loose to the imagination. It points out the selfish and depraved to our detestation, the amiable and generous to our admiration; and if it clothes the more seductive vices with the borrowed graces of wit and fancy, even those graces operate as a diversion to the coarser poison of experience and bad example, and often prevent or carry off the infection by inoculating the mind with a certain taste and elegance. To shew how little we agree with the common declamations against