368 376 ON THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE GREAT LAWSUIT BETWEEN THE 409 TO HANNAH MORE MACAULAY, December 12, 1832 TO THE SAME, December 24, 1832 TO MACVEY NAPIER, October 21, 1833 TO HANNAH MORE MACAULAY, November, 1833 TO THE SAME, December 30, 1835. TO MACVEY NAPIER, January 1, 1836 TO THOMAS FLOWER ELLIS, July 25, 1836 TO. MACVEY NAPIER, August 30, 1836 TO THE SAME, November 26, 1836 INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE POEMS Or all astonishing things in this world perhaps English poetry is the most unexpected. In Greece, in Italy, we expect to find poetry of the highest kind; the blue sky, the tender greens, the enfolding Mediterranean, the beauty of the women, the heat of the blood, mirth, art, religion prepare us for poets from Smyrna to Attica, from Thessaly to Chios, and for a Dante or a Petrarch from every city in Tuscany. In England, ce pays brumeux de Protestantisme, the factory of the world, the producer and distributer of wealth, the breeder of colonists, we expect to find the cool, practical, hard-headed Englishman; and there we find him, steady, industrious, phlegmatic, spinning cotton, building ships, making laws, in the midst of ease, respectability, and self-satisfaction. We find him the least musical of Europeans; we find his paintings of the second rank. But when we turn to his literature, "What forms are these coming Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, Marlow, Sidney, Drummond, Lovelace, Wither, Herrick, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne - here is passion, melody, variety, such as no other literature can boast. Even these are not enough. Human desires exceed all golden treasuries. There are all kinds of men. Some are all for Marlow, some for Herrick, some for Wordsworth; there are countless inclinations, and among others a taste for the poetry of rhetoric. One might be so bold as to say that if we exclude the blank verse of the great masters, English poetry has been deficient in verse of a rhetorical quality. Verse of this char |