to the order of nature. But the development of them all by the same person to any great extent, is found by experience to be very uncommon. Accident generally determines, pretty early in life, the direction of the intellectual faculties: habit soon confirms it, and after a time renders any change difficult, and finally impossible. But the genius of Shakspeare never consented to wear these common shackles. He expresses all the various emotions with equal power and freedom, and exhibits in all the same mastery over his subject, facility of style, and richness of fancy. One would hardly suppose it possible that the spirit, which raised the terrible storms of passion that distract the brain of Lear, could breathe with such melting sweetness the soft accents of pure and tender love through the lips of Juliet and Miranda, and then again burst forth with such a hearty good will in the horse-laugh of honest Jack Falstaff. Shakspeare ranges like a chartered libertine through all the domains of the understanding. He could hang up philosophy out of compliment to the charming Juliet, but when he chooses to enter the field of general observation, he puts the seven sages of Greece to the blush. It would be easy to select from his plays a body of practical ethics, superior not merely in power and beauty of expression, but in actual truth, to any treatise on the subject that has yet been produced. When he paints nature, his canvass is all alive, and when he chooses to exert his creative power, he introduces us to half a dozen imaginary worlds, each of which appears to be as real, and soon becomes as familiar to us as our own. To display a second-rate talent in several walks of art or science is nothing,-the worthless triumph of conscious mediocrity;—to excel in any one, is sufficient for the glory of any one man :—but to carry each and all at once to a greater perfection than any other person of any age or nation, is something apparently miraculous, and places the divine genius which was able to accomplish it, entirely hors de pair. Such, however, is the praise of Shakspeare. Nevertheless, he may justly be charged with occasional offences against good taste: and this seems to be an accidental result of the astonishing variety of his powers. His faults consist for the most part in bringing together in the same picture various figures, in themselves all good, but in their nature incongruous. The porter in Macbeth, for example, is a capital sketch, but he interrupts, unpleasantly, the solemn interest with which we follow out the wild and supernatural story of the play. It is impossible,

however, for a real lover of poetry, to desire, that the works of Shakspeare,-whatever may be their faults,-had been any other than they are. The enthusiastic admiration of the German school of the present day has even sanctified his errors, and proved, satisfactorily, that they are all real beauties.

By the side of this miracle of genius, the other dramatists, his contemporaries, though possessing great merit, appear at a disadvantage. The wit and learning of Jonson,-the sweetness of Beaumont and Fletcher, the power and richness of Massinger, Ford and Shirley, are eclipsed by the superior perfection of their matchless rival, in most of their as well as his peculiar qualities. They constitute, however, a noble cortège to his triumphal car. Their value was more highly appreciated by their contemporaries than it is now, for the age in which he lived, by a singular fatality, does not seem to have been fully aware of the transcendent excellence of the poet of Avon. Pepys, in his private memoirs, lately published, declares the plays of Ben Jonson to be the best he had seen, pronounces the Midsummer Night's Dream 'insipid and ridiculous,'-Othello a 'mean thing,' and Henry VIII. a simple piece of patch-work.' Such profane language as this, in the mouth of one of the best judges of the time, himself a poet and fond of the drama, may serve to console the admirers of Racine for the fall of Phèdre, and the complete failure of Athalie.

Such were the glories of the English school of poetry, in its best and brightest days, but they did not end here. The same period, which produced this brilliant constellation of dramatic poets, beheld the youth of one, whom a competent judge has declared to be 'not second' to the best of them, and who has tried his powers in a line of poetry which critics commonly regard as superior to the drama. It does not belong to us to correct the decision of Gray, upon the comparative excellence of Shakspeare and Milton, although his judgment may not, perhaps, agree with ours: nor does the cursory manner in which we are compelled to treat the subject permit us to enlarge upon the merits of the latter. We are free to confess, that with the highest admiration for the genius and character of Milton, we do not recognise in his poetry a talent of the same order with that of Shakspeare. touch is free and bold,—that of Shakspeare airy and elastic. The coloring of Milton is rich and true, that of Shakspeare fresh, bright and dewy. In, Milton's creations, we feel the hand of a master;-in those of Shakspeare, we forget

His

it. But why balance invidiously the respective merits of these illustrious men, each of them in his way original, and without a rival, and who, from the circumstances of their education, and the form of their productions, do not properly come into comparison? In fact, when Gray declares that Milton was not inferior to Shakspeare, he probably meant that they were both first-rate minds, moving in different spheres, and not susceptible of being weighed in the same balance. This is doubtless a correct view of the subject, but were we compelled to sacrifice the works of one or the other, we should consent, with comparatively little reluctance, to relinquish those of Milton.

The revival of eloquence and moral philosophy is another of the great merits of the English school of literature. Bacon and Jeremy Taylor stood at that lofty, and to most minds inaccessible height of intellectual eminence, where philosophy and poetry are seen to flow together from their common spring in the heart; and they combine the essential qualities of both. Locke took his departure from a somewhat different point. He made no account of feeling, and set but little value on what he considered the deceptive coloring of eloquence and poetry; but explored with singular clearness of view the field of intellect, which he thought worth attention. His philosophy, however, remained imperfect, and in order to produce its proper beneficial effects, required to be completed by some equally powerful mind. Instead of this, it was destined to become, in the hands of his foreign disciples, a code of immorality and falsehood, and in its practical results to unsettle, for a time the peace of Europe and the world.

Such was the brilliant state of the English school of learning and art, during the reigns of Elizabeth and James. Although the drama was discouraged in the following period of confusion and civil war, the spirit of poetry survived, and flourished in the person of Milton; and from the great display of talent, which took place after the accession of Charles, it is probable that the standard of taste would have risen still higher than it stood before, without any corresponding decline of genius, had the mind of the country continued to pursue its former independent and original course. But at this critical moment, it met the fate which befel the ruined archangel in his- tedious flight through chaos, having been struck by a side-wind, whose tempestuous rebuff drove it ten thousand fathoms

wide of its former glorious path, and gave it, for at least a century, a new and false direction. This side-wind was no other than the influence of the French school of poetry, then at its highest point of splendor and perfection. Charles II. and the train of attendants who accompanied him on his return, had been educated in this school, and had no taste for any other. Their personal and political relations with France, kept up a strict and continual intercourse between the two courts: and that of Charles was in every respect fashioned on the model established by his illustrious contemporary. Language, manners, morals, taste, politics, religion,-every thing was French. Learning and art could not fail to be affected by this revolution; and Dryden, one of the most powerful, but not least pliant of the masters of English literature, was but too well fitted by his talent and character to set the new fashion. Milton, still alive and in the fullness of his power, was forgotten, and the Paradise Lost dropped still-born from the press. The true English drama was despised as barbarous, and nothing would answer but tragedies in rhyme, on the model of Corneille and Racine. It is painful to reflect, that Glorious John,' as Dryden has by courtesy been lately called, should have prostituted a first-rate talent to the sole purpose of supplying the vicious taste of the court with these miserable wares: and after forty years of constant literary labor, have left no monuments, excepting a few short occasional pieces, really worthy of his genius. Pope followed in the same taste, but with better success, and though writing in another language, is one of the principal ornaments of the French school of poetry. But this exotic style never took deep root or flourished much in the English soil, and after the time of Pope pretty soon decayed, and came to nothing. Meantime, the true native school had also ceased to be productive, and there intervened a temporary poverty of real poetical and literary talent, greater, perhaps, than had been known since the time of Chaucer. The general movement of intellect, that came on soon after throughout all Christendom, and the expansion of the political influence and national glory of England that followed, awoke the slumbering genius of the country, and within our day another native school of learning has sprung up with a most luxuriant display of original vigor, and, having taken in the main a right direction, promises to pursue a long and successful career on both sides of the Atlantic.

Thus the brief review of English learning, into which we have now entered, brings us back to the French school, which we had already reached by the way of Madrid. It is not from any prejudice against the French style of poetry, that we have been led to represent its influence on the state of English learning as unfavorable. Pride, indeed, as well as principle, ought to induce us to do full justice to the merit of a foreign school, which possessed power enough to arrest the progress of the English mind, at one of its most active periods, and change its direction for a century. 'Great let me call him, for he conquered me.' We ought, for the honor of our fathers, to presume that the strange gods, which could draw them from their natural allegiance to Shakspeare and Milton, were not without some well-founded claims to real divinity; higher, perhaps, than the public of the present day is in general ready to admit. The character and real value of the principal writers of the French school may, probably, engage our attention in a future article.

ART. VIII.-Memoirs of Brissot.

Mémoires de Brissot, Membre de l'Assemblée Législative et de la Convention Nationale, sur ses Contemporains et la Revolution Française. Publiés par son Fils avec des Notes et des Eclaircissemens Historiques. Par M. F. DE MONTROL. A Bruxelles. 3 vols. 12mo. 1830.

"BENISSONS L'AMÉRIQUE,' exclaimed Madame Roland, in 1788, while looking forward to the great events of the next year, with that virtuous hope, and those raised expectations, which were so miserably disappointed,-attendons et voyons,bénissons l'Amérique.* In whatever temper, however lightly this emphatic expression may have been uttered, it comes full of meaning to our ear. It addresses us as the first successful propagators of those' opinions, which, like leaven, are stirring the sluggish mass around us. It commands us to consider with lenity and compassion the errors and excesses of those, who are following our footsteps, under far less advanta