As little need be said in order to deprecate the notion of effeminacy in pleasures of this kind. The French, whatever may be their defects in some matters, are at any rate not deficient in courage; and the age of Shakspeare was at once the most wise and lively, the most dancing, rural, and manly period of our English history. It is a confusion of ideas to think that these are the luxuries which announce the downfall of nations. It is bad taste of all sorts, and not good, which belongs to such a period of disease and imbecility;-gaudiness, gross intemperance, submission to ignorant tyranny, frivolous disputation,-a forsaking of real art and nature, not a love of them. The swords, with which Harmodius and Aristogeiton slew. the Grecian tyrant, were braided with myrtle.

The principal original poem in this collection is founded-on that beautiful mythology, which it is not one of the least merits of the new school to be restoring to its proper estimation. It was one of the frigid mistakes of

the French school of wit and satire, who pretended nevertheless to a great taste in ancient poetry, to see nothing but school-boy inexperience in making use of the gods and goddesses; or what is worse, to use them themselves, with the customary bad compliment at the bottom of their gallantry, as a set of toys for the ladies. The goddesses in their hands, compared with the Grecian ones, cut much about the same figure, as the perking shepherds and shepherdesses did on their mantle-pieces, compared with Theocritus. It was the mistake of men deficient in sentiment, and in a feeling for natural beauty. Yet Quinault, whom Boileau so much ridiculed, might have taught him better; and so might a common French ballet; though it appears to be the highest pitch of mythological taste to which his lively countrymen have arrived. They are a nation quick to see the superficial part of grace, but too easily satisfied perhaps to go deeper, unless the late revolution and their encreased intimacy with

other countries have begun, as is probable, to render their sprightly egotism a little more thoughtful. Boileau ridiculed Quinault, and was insensible to his merits; but our English wits, which was worse, ridiculed Boileau and fell into his faults; and to complete this chaos of mythological mistake, Johnson could justly ridicule Prior for his comparisons of Chloe to Venus and all that, and yet take pains, in his criticisms on Milton, to shew that he had no taste for Venus in all her beauty. Certainly, with every due sense of it's merit in other respect, it was a very "periwig-pated" age in all that regarded poetry, from Waller down to the Doctor inclusive; and their heads were not the better even for the periwigs themselves. A bad and shapeless costume is one of the instinctive artifices, by which dullness can authorize or suppress what associations it pleases.

Shakspeare, and the rest of our great school of poetry, saw farther into the beauty of the

Greek mythology. Spenser, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, evidently sparkled up, and had their most graceful perceptions upon them, whenever they turned to the fair forms and leafy luxuries of ancient imagination. Shakspeare, in particular, though he did not write so much about them as Spenser and Fletcher, was in this as in every thing else, a remarkable specimen of the very finest poetical instinct; for though not a scholar, he needed nothing more than the description given by scholars, good or indifferent, in order to pierce back at once into all the recesses of the original country. They told him where they had been, and he was there in an instant, though not in the track of their footing;

Battendo l'ali verso l'aurea fronde-PETR.

Beating his wings towards the golden bough.

The truth is, he felt the Grecian mythology not as a set of school-boy common-places which

it was thought manly to give up, but as something which it requires more than mere scholarship to understand,-as the elevation of the external world and of accomplished humanity to the highest pitch of the graceful, and as embodied essences of all the grand and lovely qualities of nature. His description of Proserpine and her flowers in the Winter's Tale, of the characteristic beauties of some of the gods. in Hamlet, and that single couplet in the Tempest,

You Nymphs called Naiads, of the wandering brooks, With your sedged crowns and ever harmless looks,

are in the deepest taste of antiquity, and shew that all great poets look at themselves and the fine world about them in the same clear and ever-living fountains.

The taste lingered a little, though become too Ovidian, with Cowley, who with all the conceits of the inferior Italian school then suc