and by keeping curiosity on the stretch. Not that good poetry is to be uninteresting: but the sources of its interest lie deeper, in our inmost consciousness and primary sympathies. Hence it is permanent. While the interest awakened

by curiosity fades away when the curiosity has once been gratified, true poetical interest, the interest excited by the throes and conflicts of human passion, is wont to increase as we become familiar with its object. Every time I read King Edipus, the interest seems to become more intense the knowledge of the result does not prevent my sympathizing anew with the terrific struggle. So is it in Othello. Whereas that excited by the Castle of Otranto, or the Mysteries of Udolpho, is nearly extinct after the first reading. In truth a mystery is unworthy of the name, unless it becomes more mysterious when we have been initiated into it, than it was before.

U.

Man cannot live without a shadow, even in poetry. Poetical dreamers forget this. They try to represent perfect characters, characters which shall be quite transparent: and so their heroes have no flesh and blood, no nerves or muscles, nothing to touch our sympathy, nothing for our affections to cling to.

U.

People stare much more at a paper kite, than at a real one.

U.

Brilliant speakers and writers should remember that coach-wheels are better than Catherine wheels to travel on.

Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of being grandiloquent. Eloquence is speaking out..a quality few esteem, and fewer aim at.

One's first business in writing is to say what one has to say.

Is it? Dear me ! I never knew that. Yet I have written ever so many articles in the Hypo-critical Review, laying down the law how everybody ought to write, and scolding everybody for not writing accordingly. Surely too my articles must have been admirable: for somebody told me he admired them.

U.

The best training for style is speech; not monologues, or lectures ex cathedra, like those of the German professors, of whose uninterrupted didacticity their literature bears too many marks; but conversation, whence the French, and women generally, derive the graces of their style; dialectic discussion, by which Plato braced and polisht his; and the agonistic oratory of the bar, the senate, and the forum, which makes people speak home, popularly, and to the point, as we see in our own best writers, as well as in those of Greece and Rome. For when such a practice is national, its

influence extends to those who do not come into

immediate contact with it. The pulpit too would be a like discipline, if they who mount it would oftener think as much of the persons they are preaching to, as of the preacher.

U.

An epithet is an addition: but an addition may easily be an incumbrance; as even a dog finds out, when a kettle is tied to his tail. Stuff a man into a featherbed; and he will not move so lightly or nimbly. The very instruments of flying weigh us down, if not rightly adjusted, if out of place, or overthick. Yet many writers cram their thoughts into what might not inappropriately be called a featherbed of words. They accumulate epithets, which weaken oftener than they strengthen; throwing a haze over the objects, instead of bringing out their features more distinctly. For authors too, like all the rest of mankind, take their seats among Hesiod's νήπιοι, οὐδὲ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ παντός.

As a general maxim, no epithet should be used, which does not express something not exprest in the context, nor so implied in it as to be immediately deducible. Above all, shun abusive epithets. Leave it to those who can wield nothing more powerful, to throw offensive words. Before the fire burns strongly, it smoulders and smokes when mightiest and most consuming, it is also brightest and clearest. A modern historian of the Cesars would hardly bridle his tongue

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for five lines together. In every page we should be called upon to abhor the perfidious Tiberius, the ferocious Caligula, the bloody Nero, the cruel Domitian, the tyrant, the monster, the fiend. Tacitus, although not feeble in indignation, either in feeling or expressing it, knew that no gentleman ever pelts eggshells, even at those who are set up in the pillory: nor would he have done so at him who was pilloried in St Helena.

If the narrative warrant a sentence of reprobation, the reader will not be slow in pronouncing it by taking it out of his mouth you affront him. A great master and critic in style observes, that Thucydides and Demosthenes lay it down as a rule, never to say what they have reason to suppose would occur to the auditor and reader, in consequence of anything said before; knowing that every one is more pleased, and more easily led by us, when we bring forward his thoughts indirectly and imperceptibly, than when we elbow them and outstrip them with our own:" (Imagin. Convers. i. 129). Perhaps, as is often the case in criticism, a practice resulting from an instinctive sense of beauty and fitness may here be spoken of as a rule, the subject of a conscious purpose: and when it becomes such, and is made a matter of elaborate study, the practice itself is apt to be carried too far, and to produce a zigzag style, instead of a smooth winding flow. For the old saying, that ars est celare artem, is not only applicable to works, but in a still more important sense to

authors; whose nature will never be bettered by any art, until that art becomes nature. Still, so far as such a rule tended to make our language more temperate, it could hardly be otherwise than beneficial. This temperance too, like all temperance, would greatly foster strength. For we are ever disposed to sympathize with those who repress their passions; we even spur them on; while we pull in those who are run away with by theirs and something like pity rises up toward the veriest criminal, when we see him meet with hard words, as well as hanging.

There is a difference however, as to the use of epithets, between poetry and prose. The former is allowed to dwell longer on that which is circumstantial and accessory. Ornaments may become a ball-dress, which would be unseasonable of a morning. The walk of Prose is a walk of business, along a road, with an end to reach, and without leisure to do more than take a glance at the prospect: Poetry's on the other hand is a walk of pleasure, among fields and groves, where she may often loiter and gaze her fill, and even stoop now and then to cull a flower. Yet ornamental epithets are not essential to poetry: should you fancy they are, read Sophocles, and read Dante. Or if you would see how the purest and noblest poetry may be painted and rouged out of its grandeur by them, compare Pope's translations of Homer with the original, or Tate and Brady's of the Psalms with the prose version.

U.