of the fancy, and an inconsiderate straining after a magnificence which they had not skill or patience to attain.

We come now to the Literature of the North,-by which name Mad. de Staël designates the literature of England and Germany, and on which she passes an encomium which we scarcely expected from a native of the South. She startles us a little, indeed, when she sets off with a dashing parallel between Homer and Ossian; and proceeds to say, that the peculiar character of the Northern literature has all been derived from that Patriarch of the Celts, in the same way as that of the South of Europe may be ultimately traced back to the genius of Homer. It is certainly rather against this hypothesis, that the said Ossian has only been known to the readers and writers of the North for about forty years from the present day, and has not been held in especial reverence with those who have most disstinguished themselves in that short period. However, we shall suppose that Mad. de Staël means only, that the style of Ossian reunites the peculiarities that distinguish the Northern school of letters, and may be supposed to exhibit them such as they were before the introduction of the classical and Southern models. We rather think she is right in saying, that there is a radical difference in the taste and genius of the two regions; and that there is more melancholy, more tenderness, more deep feeling and fixed and lofty passion, engendered among the clouds and mountains of the North, than upon the summer seas or beneath the perfumed groves of the South. The causes of the difference are not perhaps so satisfactorily stated.

Mad de Staël gives the first place to the climate.

Les réveries des poètes peuvent enfanter des objets extraordinaires; mais les impressions d'habitude se retrouvent nécessairement dans tout ce que l'on compose. Eviter le souvenir de ces impressions, ce seroit perdre le plus grand des avantages, celui de peindre ce qu'on a soi-même éprouvé. Les poètes du midi mêlent sans cesse l'image de la fraîcheur, des bois touffus, des ruisseaux limpides, à tous les sentimens de la vie. Ils ne se retracent pas même les jouissances du cœur, sans y mêler l'idée de l'ombre bienfaisante, qui doit les préserver des brûlantes ardeurs du soleil. Cette nature si vive qui les environne, excite en eux plus de mouvemens que de pensées. C'est à tort, ce me semble, qu'on a dit que les passions étoient plus violentes dans le midi que dans le nord. On y voit plus d'intérêts divers, mais moins d'intensité dans une même pensée; or c'est la fixité qui produit les miracles de la passion et de la volonté. Les peuples du nord sont moins occupés des plaisirs que de la douleur; et leur imagination n'en est que plus féconde. Le spectacle de la nature agit fortement sur eux; et elle agit, comme elle se montre dans leurs climats, toujours sombre et nébuleuse.' p. 254, 255.

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Another characteristic is the hereditary independence of the Northern tribes-arising partly from their scattered population and inaccessible retreats, and partly from the physical force and hardihood which their way of life, and the exertions requisite to procure subsistence in those regions, necessarily produced. Their religious creed, too, even before their conversion to Christianity, was less fantastic, and more capable of leading to heroic emotions than that of the Southern nations. The respect and tenderness with which they always regarded their women, is another cause (or effect) of the peculiarity of their national character; and, lastly, their general adoption of the Protestant faith has tended to confirm that character. For our own part, we are inclined to ascribe more weight to the last circumstance, than to all the others that have been mentioned; and that not merely from the better education which it is the nius of Protestantism to bestow on the lower orders, but from the necessary effect of the universal study of the Scriptures which it enjoins. A very great proportion of the Protestant population of Europe is familiarly acquainted with the Bible; and there are many who are acquainted with scarcely any other book. Now, the Bible is not only full of lessons of patience, and humility and compassion, but abounds with a gloomy and awful poetry, which cannot fail to make a powerful impression on minds that are not exposed to any other, and receive this under the persuasion of its divine origin. The peculiar character, therefore, which Mad. de Staël has ascribed to the people of the North in general, will now be found, we believe, to belong only to such of them as profess the reformed religion; and to be discernible in all the communities that maintain that profession, without much regard to the degree of latitude which they inhabit-though at the same time it is undeniable, that its general adoption in the North must be explained by some of the more general causes which we have shortly indicated above.

The great fault which the French impute to the writers of the North, is want of taste and politeness. They generally admit that they have genius; but contend that they do not know how to use it; while their partisans maintain, that what is called want of taste is merely excess of genius, and independ ence of pedantic rules and authorities. Mad. de Staël, though admitting the transcendent merits of some of the English writers, takes part, upon the whole, against them in this controversy; and, after professing her unqualified preference of a piece compounded of great blemishes and great beauties, compared with one free of faults, but distinguished by little excelnce, proceeds very wisely to remark, that it would be still

better if the great faults were corrected—and that it is but a bad species of independence which manifests itself by being occasionally offensive and then she attacks Shakespeare, as usual, for interspersing so many puerilities and absurdities and grossiéretés with his sublime and pathetic passages.

Now, there is no denying, that a poem would be better without faults; and that judicious painters use shades only to set off their pictures, and not blots. But there are two little remarks to be made. In the first place, if it be true that an extreme horror at faults is usually found to exclude a variety of beauties, and that a poet can scarcely ever attain the higher excellencies of his art, without some degree of that rash and headlong confidence which naturally gives rise to blemishes and excesses, it may not be quite so absurd to hold, that this temperament and disposition, with all its hazards, deserves encouragement, and to speak with indulgence of faults that are symptomatic of great beauties. There is a primitive fertility of soil that naturally throws out weeds along with the matchless crops which it alone can bear; and we might reasonably grudge to reduce its vigour for the sake of purifying its produce. There are certain savage virtues that can scarcely exist in perfection in a state of complete civilization; and, as specimens at least, we may wish to preserve, and be allowed to admire them, with all their exceptionable accomplishments. It is easy to say, that there is no necessary connexion between the faults and the beauties of our great dramatist; but the fact is, that since men have become afraid of falling into his faults, no one has approached to his beauties; and we have already endeavoured, on more than one occasion, * to explain the grounds of this connexion. But our second remark is, that it is not quite fair to represent the controversy as arising altogether from the excessive and undue indulgence of the English for the admitted faults of their favourite authors, and their persisting to idolize Shakespeare in spite of his buffooneries, extravagancies, and bombast. We admit that he has those faults; and, as they are faults, that he would be better without them: But there are many things which the French call faults, which we consider as beauties. And here, we suspect, the dispute does not admit of any settlement; because both parties, if they are really sincere in their opinion, and understand the subject of discussion, may very well be right, and for that very reason incapable of coming to any agreement. We consider taste to mean merely the faculty of receiving pleasure

* See our remarks on Franklin, vol, VIII. p. 329, &c.; and on Burns, vol. XIII. p. 250, &c.

from beauty; and, so far as relates to the person receiving that pleasure, we apprehend it to admit of little doubt, that the best taste is that which enables him to receive the greatest quantity of pleasure from the greatest number of things. With regard to the author again, or artist of any other description, who pretends to bestow the pleasure, his object of course should be, to give as much, and to as many persons as possible; and especially to those who, from their rank and education, are likely to regulate the judgment of the remainder. It is his business therefore to ascertain what does please the greater part of such persons, and to fashion his productions according to the rules of taste which may be deduced from that discovery. Now, we humbly conceive it to be a complete and final justification for the whole body of the English nation, who understand French as well as English and yet prefer Shakespeare to Racine, just to state, modestly and firmly, the fact of that preference; and to declare, that their habits and tempers, and studies and occupations, have been such as to make them receive far greater pleasure from the more varied imagery-the more flexible tonethe closer imitation of nature-the more rapid succession of incident, and vehement bursts of passion of the English author, than from the unvarying majesty-the claborate argument-and epigrammatic poetry of the French dramatist. For the taste of the nation at large, we really cannot conceive that any other apology can be necessary; and though it might be very desirable that they should agree with their neighbours upon this point, as well as upon many others, we can scarcely imagine any upon which their disagreement could be attended with less inconvenience. For the authors, again, that have the misfortune not to be so much admired by the adjoining nations as by their own countrymen, we can only suggest, that this is a very common misfortune; and that, as they wrote in the language of their country, and will probably be always most read within its limits, it was not perhaps altogether unwise or unpardonable in them to accommodate themselves to the taste which was there established.

Mad. de Staël has a separate chapter upon Shakespeare; in which she gives him full credit for originality, and for having been the first, and perhaps the only considerable author, who did not copy from preceding models, but drew all his greater conceptions directly from his own feelings and observations. His representations of human passions, therefore, are incomparably more true and touching, than those of any other writer; and are presented, moreover, in a far more elementary and simple state, and without any of those circumstances of dignity

or contrast with which feebler artists seem to have held it indispensable that they should be set off. She considers him as the first writer who has ventured upon the picture of overwhelming sorrow and hopeless wretchedness ;-that desolation of the heart, which arises from the long contemplation of ruined hopes and irreparable privation;-that inward anguish and bitterness of soul which the public life of the antients prevented them from feeling, and their stoical precepts interdicted them from disclosing. The German poets, and some succeeding English authors, have produced a prodigious effect by the use of this powerful instrument; but nothing can exceed the original sketches of it exhibited in Lear, in Hamlet, in Timon of Athens, and in some parts of Richard and of Othello. He has likewise drawn, with the hand of a master, the struggles of nature under the immediate contemplation of approaching death; and that without those supports of conscious dignity or exertion with which all other writers have thought it necessary to blend or to contrast their pictures of this emotion. But it is in the excitement of the two proper tragic passions of pity and terror, that the force and originality of his genius are most conspicuous; pity not only for youth and innocence, and nobleness and virtue, as in Imogen and Desdemona, Brutus and Coriolanusbut for insignificant persons like the Duke of Clarence, or profligate and worthless ones like Cardinal Wolsey ;-terror, in all its forms, from the madness of Lear, and the ghost of Hamlet, up to the dreams of Richard and Lady Macbeth. In comparing the effects of such delineations with the superstitious horror excited by the mythological persons of the Greek drama, the vast superiority of the English author cannot fail to be apparent. Instead of supernatural beings interfering, with their cold and impassive natures, in the agitations and sufferings of men, Shakespeare employs only the magic of powerful passion, and of the illusions to which it gives birth. The phantoms and apparitions which he occasionally conjures up to add to the terror of the scene, are in truth but a bolder personification of those troubled dreams, and thick coming fancies, which harrow up the souls of guilt and agony; and even his sorcery and incantation are but traits of the credulity and superstition which so frequently accompany the exaltation of the greater passions. But perhaps the most miraculous of all his representations, are those in which he has pourtrayed the wanderings of a disordered intellect, and especially of that species of distraction which arises from excess of sorrow. Instead of being purely terrible, those scenes are, in his hands, in the highest degree touching and pathetic; and the wildness of fancy, and richness of imagery which they display, are even less admirable than the constant, though incoherent expression of