chivalry is still an operant influence in the English nation. Retrenched of its old splendour and picturesqueness, subordinated to the growing element of commerce, it is still there, not merely as an image flashing before the fancy of the individual, but as a living power affecting the faith and manners of the people. For though the predominant characteristic in eighteenth century art and literature is its strong perception of the realities of life, and the vividness with which it portrays the evil side of human nature, it still shows itself alive to man's nobler aspirations. If it has created for us Tom Jones, and Moll Flanders, and Sporus, and Jonathan Wild, it has also created Sir Roger de Coverley, the Man of Ross, the Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson Crusoe, and Uncle Toby, together with that air of grace and high-breeding visible in the work of the great portrait-painters of the age. Its types are limited and to some extent formal, but as far as they go they are manly and natural. The very limitation of its ideal gives an added dis-! tinctness to the form in which it is expressed. Style and method are, in all the arts, the objects of constant consideration, and Pope's principles of correctness in versification find a counterpart in the rules of painting elaborated by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his 'Discourses' to the Royal Academy. In second-rate artists and writers this strict attention to propriety often leads, no doubt, to stiffness and bombast, but even in them it acts as a salutary preventive against vulgarity, obscurity, and inaccuracy of expression. III. WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY. Not that I think the amiable bard of Rydale shows judg ment in choosing such subjects as the popular mind cannot sympathize in. I do not compare myself in point of imagination with Wordsworth, far from it; for his is naturally exquisite, and highly cultivated from constant exercise. But I cry no roast-meat. There are times a man should remember what Rousseau used to say: 'Tais-toi, Jean Jacques, car on ne t'entend pas.' . . . The error is not in you yourself receiving deep impressions from slight hints, but in supposing that precisely the same sort of impressions must rise in the minds of men, otherwise of kindred feeling; or that the commonplace folk of the world can derive such inductions at any time or under any circumstances.-Scott's Journal, January 1, 1827. In the last paper I said that one of the most marked features of the imaginative genius of the eighteenth century was its limitation. When the range of thought and feeling in the 'Canterbury Tales,' the 'Faery Queen,' Shakespeare's plays, and Paradise Lost,' is compared with the subject matter of Dryden and Pope's satires, of the Vanity of Human Wishes,' the Elegy in 6 |