Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, were applied to the uses that they were. For while Bacon employed his wide-ranging intellect in teaching the best mode of philosophising, and the method by which alone philosophic discoveries can be made, until, like Moses, he stood upon the very borders of the Promised Land, "And from the mountain-top of his exalted wit, Saw it himself, and shewed men it ;"'* Shakspeare, whose plastic genius turned everything to poetry, as the touch of Midas converted all things into gold, so enshrined the best of the ancient ballads in his works,—which, like the boughs of that umbrageous elm which Virgil has placed in the Kingdom of Shades, shelter all manner of dreams, the loveliest and the wildest, the fellest and the foulest,t-that they seem to have derived additional lustre from the undecaying brightness with which he has surrounded them. The great dissensions, moreover, which in the succeeding reign turned the talent and energy of the people into other channels, were already, towards the end of King James's rule, casting their shadows forward, and spreading them, broad and black, over the minds of men. And when the storm did break forth, the psalms of the Puritans and the ribald bacchanalian chants of the Cavaliers, (and every man in those days sided with the one party or the other,) drove the lays of the olden time entirely out of the field. Then came the servile, mincing, frenchified school of the Restoration—a school of the most disgusting license and obscenity-tending still farther to obliterate the memory of the terse, nervous simplicity of the ancient ballad; until the minds of men, even upon the genial soil of Britain, began to feel its deadening and degrading influence. It rested with Dryden to have turned the scale and introduced a better order of things; but he, alas! was poor, and too easily seduced into the arms of the Court; and thus the man on whose single will was suspended the fate of the literature of a great nation, prostituted his talents and sacrificed his integrity for—a crust of bread! Well and finely has Scott said of this great poet, (for great, with all his faults, he undoubtedly was,) "And Dryden, in immortal strain, Bade him play on to make them sport; The world, defrauded of the high design, Profaned the God-given strength and marred the lofty line." To pursue this sketch farther, however, and notice, even in the most cursory manner, the different schools that succeeded-the elegant, precise, singularly artificial one of Queen Ann's wits; the shambling, nondescript one of the reigns of the first two Georges; and the bolder and more masculine one of that of the third-to refer to each of these in succession, even in the most general terms, would take up far too much of our time and (what * Cowley's Ode to the Royal Society. "In medio ramos annosaque brachia pandit ENEID, Lib. vi. 1. 282-4. is at present, perhaps, of much greater importance) our space. But having already, as we are inclined to think, sufficiently demonstrated the proposition laid down in the commencement of this paper, viz., that in the spirit of the Ballad is breathed the spirit of the age in which it is composed; and, in establishing this point, necessarily developed, so far as space would permit, the nature and extent of the influence exercised by it in days of old over the popular mind; we shall now proceed, briefly and generally, to consider how far, in our own times, that influence has retrograded, and what the present condition and future prospects of the Ballad is and may be. That Ballad Poetry has ceased to be generally popular with the lower classes in this country is, in our opinion, pretty fully evidenced by the fact, (even if no other proof of its abated influence existed,) that when, about a quarter of a century ago, a scheme for affixing twenty thousand broad-sheet tracts to the walls of the cottages in the West of England was completed, amongst all the bundles of ribaldry and trash displaced to make room for them, not a single specimen appeared of what could properly be classed as an old English Ballad *. And in the truism that we are every day receding farther from those habits of life, thinking, and feeling, which in the days of our forefathers gave birth to the Songs of the Scald and the Minstrel, will a sufficient reason, it strikes us, be found to account for a change which, sooth to say, we are neither sentimental nor romantic enough greatly to regret. For, in proportion as a nation, leaving barbarism behind, advances in the march of civilisation, and turns its attention to the furtherance of agricultural and commercial enterprise, so, in a corresponding degree, will the mental energies of its people be bent on the graver realities of life, and a tone of thought and feeling be engendered the most alien to superstition and enthusiasm, freezing up the spirit of romance, and banishing the days of chivalry for And with every step in this forward movement will the thirst after political, and what is generally termed useful, knowledge keep steady pace. The relations of abstract ideas-the properties of matterthe qualities of mind-and the several modifications which the general principles of Civil Polity undergo, will, from the first, naturally form the principal subjects of that people's meditation; inasmuch as it is impossible for man to contemplate any fact in the material, moral, or political world, and still rest satisfied with the simple knowledge that such thing is. There being, moreover, a positive pleasure in that exercise of the mental faculties which scientific research, whether abstract, physical, or psychological, affords; one, too, which conduces to the most important practical ends; it were, indeed, worse than folly to suppose that, with this pleasure and this advantage, science could fail to bear away the palm from an art, which, raised upon however noble a foundation, and making however much for the dignity of man's nature, is merely calculated, in the felicitous language of Bacon*, " to give to human nature what history denies it, and ever. * De Augmentis Scientiarum, lib. ii. cap. 13. . to satisfy the mind with shadows, at least of things where the substance is unattainable.” And thus, in the end, will the Ballad, which in the dark ages, not even excepting religion, was the one great instrument of diffusing knowledge amongst the people, wholly deprived of the chief source of its influence, identity with the times and circumstances it celebrates,-be only able to lay claim to a very subordinate place in the grand scheme for the promotion of human improvement. And that some such course as that now described has been ours in the history of the world's culture, a moment's reflection will convince every reader. While, therefore, to the prevalence of this taste for scientific research, as well as to the marvellous increase of cheap periodical publications, and the "vast amount of entertaining knowledge" now made so generally accessible, by means of commercial enterprise, to the very lowest and poorest of the community, the decay of the influence of the Ballad must be principally attributed; its very nature-were we to judge from the great generality of the specimens that daily issue from the press-would even seem to be alien to the spirit of our age. From its stern rejection of all extrinsic beauties, however cognate; its undeviating reliance on actual existence alone tangible things-things that may be seen, felt, and understood; as much as from its startling alternations of revelry and bloodshed, of love and hatred, of rapture and despair, the Ballad of the days of our fathers presents the strongest possible contrast to the Narrative Poem of the present times. In this last, indeed, it is but seldom that there is sufficient power of attraction to hold firmly together the heterogeneous materials of which it is for the most part composed. Serving as a convenient stalking-horse whereupon to hang descriptions and dissertations the most foreign to its bent-becoming, as it were, a nucleus round which, as in Childe Harold, to congregate the brightest fancies and the richest spoils of genius; or, as in The Excursion, to cluster, in wildest luxuriance, the spiritual philosophisings of him who is "Nature's high-priest," "That fall as soft as snow in the sea, And melt in the heart as instantly,' the Narrative Poem of the nineteenth century, with much of tenderness, withal, and delicacy, and sweetness-with pictures of nature the most pleasing—with imagery the most profuse-with diction the most happy, and versification the most harmonious-nay, not unfrequently, with much of passion even and sublimity-is, generally speaking, entirely deficient in that noble simplicity and unity of conception and execution which distinguish the productions of a former age. And if this be true of the Narrative Poem as compared with the Ballad, what shall we say of those manifold imitations of the latter, with which our modern literature abounds? Nothing, in truth, can be more offensive to us than, with a few exceptions, the entire mass of the compositions of the soi-disant restorers of this species of poetry. It is not, we would take leave to remind these learned Thebans, by giving the appearance of antiquity to their commonplace abstractions, by interlarding them with obsolete words, and embodying them in anomalous measures of the most antediluvian construction and the most unmusical cadence, that they can ever hope to rival the excellences of the "real antique;" nor is it by making choice of events which now live only in vague and remote tradition-but by taking for their subjects life as it falls under their own observation, and treating that in all simplicity of thought, feeling, and language, that they will ever, in modern times, succeed in reviving the old ballad style of writing. For he who attempteth otherwise can be nothing more than a bungler, or— as Fichte somewhere says, after his usual austere fashion, but with no little beauty, and a great deal of truth-"an ambiguous mongrel between the possessor of the Idea and the man who feels himself solidly supported and carried on by the Common Reality of things: in his fruitless endeavours after the Idea, he has neglected to acquire the craft of taking part in this Reality; and so hovers between two worlds; without pertaining to either." * Yet how much into this grievous error have even the best of our Ballad-writers fallen! With the exception, in some instances, of Campbell, Southey, and a few others, all of these, from Mallet, Shenstone, and Hamilton, down to Procter, Croly, and Monk Lewis, have laid themselves open to the charge, that, instead of having written from immediate, minute, and long-continued inspection of human life in its diverse phases, they stand indebted for all the beauties that may garnish their productions either to Art or to Nature at second-hand-their whole compositions being entirely destitute of the force and simplicity of the Antique models; impregnated (save, perhaps, in some degree, Hamilton's "Braes o' Yarrow") with all the mawkish tenderness and puling sentimentality peculiar to the present day; and, as we have before hinted, of a structure so loose and incongruous as, upon the slightest touch, to break and fall asunder, like the Great Image which Nebuchadnezzar saw in his nightvision, whose feet were part of iron and part of clay. Scott, indeed, perhaps more than most men, by making everything subservient, so to speak, to actual existence, has succeeded in transfusing into a connected tissue of adventures the very soul and spirit of a particular age; so that from the fresh, living, breathing, moving pictures sketched by his powerful pencil, we obtain a deeper insight into the manners and characters of the times to which they respectively refer, than from all the musty tomes of contemporary chroniclers and Annalists put together: while, on the other hand, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and Joanna Baillie, have, as much by their choice of subjects, as by combining the peculiar excellences both of ancient and modern composition, done much towards reviving a taste for legendary and romantic lore, until they now stand, as it were, emblems and heralds of the Ballad's awakening from its long sleep, and form, in the words of Richter, "the Ethnic Forecourt of the Invisible Temple and its Holy of Holies!" And the music which therein breathed is poetry We have not the book beside us, but the passage, it strikes us, will be found in Fichte's Heber das Wesen des Gelehrten ;-On the Nature of the Literary Man. + Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz. poetry in the very highest sense of that word-poetry which is the language of the Soul, the language of universal Love-love of nature, of moral truth, of excellence and beauty; which is powerful as the talisman of the magician, bringing within the circle it has drawn the richest treasures of the Earth; which is lavish of its sweets, as Spring of its fruits and flowers; but which flows from those lips alone which have been touched, if we may so say, by a live coal from off the Altar of Truth! "As all Nature's thousand changes But one changeless God proclaim, "This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, In conclusion, then, inasmuch as we love the Ballad, because in it we can trace reflected, if not the circumstances and events in which it takes its rise, at least the customs and feelings which modify these; so until men be able, either like Scott to identify their works with the spirit of the times of which they write, or, abandoning ancient for modern subjects, follow in the footsteps of Campbell and Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge, they must never expect to succeed in reviving, to anything even approximating to its pristine splendour and influence, the Ballad Poetry of the Olden Time. DANAË. (FROM THE GREEK OF SIMONIDES.) [ACRISIUS, king of the Argives, having learned from the oracle that he should be killed by his grandson, shut up his daughter in a turret, who, nevertheless, became pregnant to Jupiter of the Golden Shower. When he understood that she had given birth to a son, he ordered them to be put into a chest, or ark, and thrown into the sea. The chest was found by a fisherman and given to Pilumnus, king of the Rutili, who married Danaë. When Perseus, her son, grew up, he accidentally slew his grandfather, and thus fulfilled the oracle.] Around the ark the night-wind howl'd- The lurid clouds were gathering fast, In wreaths, upon the lee. Large tear drops filled the mother's eyes, And trickled down her cheek, As to her breast her babe she press'd, "Ah me! my son, what grief is mine! "Dreary and wild is thine abode, |