rogative is to exert a paramount power over the common heart. Its themes are sublime and momentous-the arcana of science are rendered tributary to its teachings, because the works illustrate the Will of the Supreme. This mission of the Gospel it was that fired the zeal of that worthy of old, whose eloquent appeals "shook Areopagus, and reverberated through the Forum." "The Christian priesthood, although the temptation incident to conventional elevation may have served to develope among them many of the subtler forms of evil latent in the undisciplined heart, is yet lustrous with many virtues. What sweetness has baptised the clerical function in the past! What fortitude, what self-denial, what patience, what labour in season and out of season, have been the heritage of the great mass of these men! What stores of learning have they accumulated; what splendid additions have they made to the best literature of every land: how they have enriched the sciences by their observation and studious inquiries; how they have kept the flame of patriotism aglow; how they have encouraged the generous ambition of youth, and directed it to worthy and useful ends: how they have dignified the family altar, and cherished the purity of woman, and diffused through society the charm of honest and gentle manners; all these things must be cordially acknowledged by every one competent to speak on the question."* * Chapin. THE LARCENIES OF LITERATURE. ORIGINALITY has been defined "unconscious or undetected imitation." "As for originality," wrote Byron, in his journal, "all pretensions to it are ridiculous; 'there is nothing new under the sun.'” Moore, once observing Byron with a book full of paper-marks, asked him what it was. "Only a book," he answered, "from which I am trying to crib; as I do whenever I can, and that's the way I get the character of an original poet." "Though, in imputing to himself premeditated plagiarism," observes his biographer, "he was, of course, but jesting; it was, I am inclined to think, his practice, when engaged in the composition of any work, to excite thus his vein, by the perusal of others on the same subject or plan, from which the slightest hint, caught by his imagination as he read, was sufficient to kindle there such a train of thought as, but for that spark, had never been awakened, and of which he himself soon forgot the source." Emerson says an author is original in proportion to the amount he steals from Plato; and to those who are not much acquainted with Plato, he thus divulges the secret of much of his claim to originality. Even Seneca complains that the ancients had compelled him to borrow from them what they would have taken from him, had he been lucky enough to have preceded them. "Every one of my writings," says Goethe, in the same candid spirit, "has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things; the learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and age, have come in turn, generally, without having the least suspicion of it, to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experience: often have they sowed the harvest I have reaped. My work is that of an aggregation of human beings, taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe." "It is in the power of any writer to be original, by deserting nature, and seeking the quaint and fantastical; but literary monsters, like all others, are generally short-lived. 'When I was a young man,' says Goldsmith, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions; but I soon gave this over, for I found that generally, what was Strictly speaking, we may be original without being new; our thoughts may be our own, and yet commonplace." * new was false.' On the other hand, it must be admitted with Pollock, that while "the siccaneous critic or the meagre scribbler may hang his head in despair, and murmur out that what can be done is done already; yet he who has drank of Castalia's fount, and listened to the mighty voice of the Parnassian sisters, and who casts his bold eye on Creation, inexhaustible as its Maker, and catches inspiration while he gazes; will take the lyre in his hand, delight with new melody the ear of mortals, and write his name among the immortal in song. A contemporary, † writing on this subject, insists that, "what is often termed originality, is more a manufactured article than a natural product. Moore, in dwelling upon the elaborate care with which all the performances of Sheridan were prepared, was led to exclaim, genius is patience.' An original thinker may be considered as one who has grown mentally fat upon the food great minds in all ages of the world have afforded him. Montaigne and Emerson, as we have seen, have confessed, with careless frankness, some of the sources of their originality. "Of course it is necessary that nature should have furnished a tolerably broad and capacious foundation for mental fatness to be laid upon. It is impossible to make a very fat hog of a Guinea pig. All men have not a disposition, and could not cultivate one, to grapple with the deep and subtle thoughts of profound minds. Books, books,' says Bulwer; 'magnets to which all iron minds insensibly move.' Minds of a softer metal, of a less investigating character, do not move in that direction. The mind grows by what it feeds upon, and no man can be an original thinker without a good deal of knowledge. All that was wanting, perhaps, to develope the powers of 'the village Hampden,' 'the mute, inglorious Milton,' and 'the guiltless Cromwell,' that the country churchyard contained, was knowledge. But knowledge is of no value unless it is well digested; and in this respect nature is an infallible guide. Minds, like stomachs, have little relish for food they cannot digest; and there is every variety of strength in the digestive powers of the mind as of the body." The same idea is enforced by another writer, in a more facetious strain. He says, "We prey upon the literary productions of the past, as we do upon the brains of Italian and French cooks of the present, and while our palates will carry a teeth-watering reminiscence of some favourite dish, concocted by the one, while the tongue which discussed it articulates, is it remarkable that our pates should retain some of the attic flavour of the former? Our constitutions are made or unmade by the food we eat. Our brains, by the books we read. Men of great natural genius, and who have not had opportunities for much book 'culture,' even as the most bodily healthy people, are evidences of the truth that strong, simple food is far superior to the diablerie of modern wizard-cooks, in either case. Emerson assumes, that it is the duty and the province of great minds to adopt the thoughts of others-to embalm them for futurity-to take the roughly hewn blocks from the thoughtmines of others, and fashion them into mosques, feudal towers, or pyramids, as the loving, chivalrous, or sublime spirit of the builder may suggest. This communistic appropriation of ideas—this building from another's quarry—is a species of free-masonry which is qualified entirely by the name of him who is caught in the fact. It has been gravely asked who are original thinkers; even those who rank as philosophical writers adopt the opinions of their predecessors-some favourite theory of a former age; and having espoused it, they endorse the new creed with an enthusiasm as zealous as if it were one of their own creation. There are a few noble exceptions to the rule, however, for the honour of learning; the daring Florentine, for instance: a large proportion of our modern literature might be, with advantage to all parties, suppressed, since it possesses in the main but the questionable merit of metamorphoses. The remark ascribed to Pope Ganganelli, that all books in the known world might be comprised in six thousand folio volumes, if filled with original matter-was, we think, an extremely liberal estimate. One age battens upon its predecessor with gnome-like rapacity, and thus a host of pseudo-authors acquire an undeserved reputation. The quaint lines of Chaucer still apply with full force "Out of the olde fieldes, as men sayeth, Cometh all this new corne fro yeare to yeare, Cometh all this newe science that men lere." Homer,* Dante, Rabelais, and Shakspeare, Chateaubriand styles the great universal individualities and great parent geniuses, who appear to have nourished all others. The first fertilised antiquity; Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Horace, Aristophanes, and Virgil were his sons. Dante in like manner was the father of modern Italy, from Petrarch to Tasso. Rabelais created the literature of France; Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière, descended from him: while England owes all to Shakspeare. People often deny the authority of these supreme masters-they rebel against them, proclaim their defects, but with as much propriety as one might the spots on * Homer's Gardens of Alcinous in the Odyssey, and the Elysium of the Eneid, were perhaps taken from the Mosaic account of Eden. |