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that ready and instinctive perception of what is pleasing to the public, and all those graces of elegant composition, the want of which not unfrequently renders the valuable knowledge of his present opponents less acceptable than it deserves to be to the great majority of English readers.

After all, what permanently good effect would this produce? I am far from being of the opinion of those who hate criticism because they consider it as the token of a declining literature. I know that Greece had no great poets after the time of Aristotle; but I think that this defect was produced by causes very different from the publication of the Rhetorick and the Poetick. Our own literature produced the greatest of all modern critics, before we had a single great poet. Spirits of the highest order can never be injured by knowledge. It is true, that Homer and Shakspeare made no critical prefaces; but is it possible to believe, that these men were really ignorant of any thing worth knowing respecting their own art, which a Gifford, a Jeffray, or even, to take much higher men, which a Lessing or a Herder could have taught them? My dear friend, journals such as the modern English critics can produce, have in truth no influence at all over the minds of men capable of attaining the first eminence in literature. These go on in their destined way, rejoicing in the consciousness of their own strength, and having their eyes fixed upon the sure prospect of immortality far above the reign, either of calumniating wit or ignorant approbation. But the world produces many gentle and elegant minds, which might contribute, both to the delight and instruction of their species—minds on which the first of men would look with benevolent affection, but which cannot endure the cold jeers and taunts even of those whom they feel to be their inferiors. To these men the dun-coloured cover of the Quarterly, or the bright blue and yellow of the Edinburgh Review, is as horrible as the gorgon's head upon the buckler of Pallas. It is sufficiently unfortunate that these bugbears exist,—why should any one desire to see all their terrific influences united? As for the effects which the habitual perusal of such works as these journals has upon the manners and minds of the English, that is a subject which will require a letter for itself. I confess that my hopes of their recovery from the state of contented ignorance and conceit, into which they have been brought by the ministrations of their Reviewers, are still entire. I doubt not, that ere long, as Shakspeare has said of Prince Henry,

The Lecturer began by remarking, that the fine arts, in different ages and countries, had usually reached their utmost point of perfection, almost immediately after their birth; and used this fact to combat the doctrine of the progressive perfectibility of the human mind. He admitted that the opposite of this had been the case with respect to science; and made it the distinctive difference between that and art, that the one never arrives at perfect maturity, and the other leaps from infancy to manhood at once. After corroborating these positions by examples, and touching slightly on the causes of them, Mr Hazlitt proceeded to speak of Dryden and Pope as distinguished from the great poets of whom he had already treated, viz. Chaucer, Spencer, Shakspeare and Milton,—not by different degrees of excellence, but by excellence of an entirely different kind. The former, as well as the latter, stood at the head of a class, though a confessedly inferior one; but they were entitled to rank higher than those who occupied a lower station in the superior class. The inferior poets of the higher class must be content to follow in the train of Shakspeare and Milton; but Dryden and Pope walk by their side, though of unequal stature. The question, whether Pope was a poet, said Mr H., has hardly been settled yet, and is hardly worth settling; for, if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prose-writer, for he was a great writer of some sort. If, indeed,