many

and record, but often much more of what he unconsciously reveals. Some books from their very nature, reveal very little of their author's feelings and character. But very books communicate much more, at times, than he designs or desires. The sonnets of Shakspeare, the poems of Milton, the playful and serious essays of Cowper, the meditations of Wordsworth, the passionate outbreaks of Byron, the vague aspirations of Shelley, and the prolonged lament of Tennyson, when skillfully interpreted, enable us to penetrate into the secrets of their hearts, and open to us the hidden springs of their character. It is the office of the critic to discriminate between what does and what does not express the man, and thus to interpret the man by many of his works; and the service which he renders to the reader is often of surpassing interest.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CRITICISM OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

THE features of modern criticism which have been enumerated, may suffice. We may perhaps more profitably, as well as more practically, proceed to consider our own literature as a field for its exercise. We may aver with confidence, that English literature furnishes the amplest, the most varied, and the most interesting materials for the critic, of any whether ancient or modern. It ought not to surprise us that it should. The compound structure of the language gives an advantage to the writer as well as to the philologist, furnishing often a richer choice of terms, a greater variety of phrases, and a wider range of structure, than is possible for any other modern tongue. That this structure pertains to its form alone is true, but the form in this instance happens to furnish large capacities for the embodiment and expressions of a rich and manifold material. This material is rich and manifold, chiefly, because its people have been free, have been bold in thought, and earnest in feeling. They have been moved and stirred by the largest spirit of adventure in commerce, in war, in colonizing, and in self-government. They have had an intense religious spirit, manifested in a sufficient variety of forms, and inspiring to fervent faith, to martyr-like boldness, and to consistent and heroic self-denial. They have had earnest political struggles for the crown and against the crown -for the liberty of the commons, and the traditional rights of the people, and for the divine right of kings, and the dignity of the royal prerogative. They have had sacred

and happy homes,-fireside enjoyments hallowed by domestic love, and made doubly sacred and dear by ancestral recollections. They have had exhaustless and irrepressible humor-an inborn love of noisy hilarity, an infinitude of original characters to provoke this humor, and inspire the songs of a people ever ready to be excited to uproarious merriment. They have had a free press-a free pulpit, and free newspapers, in spite of occasional censorship, packed juries, and venal judges.

If we trace the history and characteristics of this literature we may well be amazed at its varied riches, and be excited to avail ourselves of its inviting stores by a more earnest as well as a more critical use of its ample resources.

We begin with Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales we have a worthy counterpart to the Odyssey, giving as they do, a graphic and varied picture of the many-sided life, and the strongly marked characteristics which, even at this very early period, were manifest among the English people. Indeed we could not desire a more satisfactory illustration of the truth and justice of all that we have said of literature as a field for the study of history, than is furnished in these tales of Chaucer. The attentive reader cannot fail to observe how eminently true it is that the times illustrate the author and the author illustrates his times; how, through these tales, we have a direct insight into the manners and the sentiments, the customs and the philosophy of our ancestors, as they were, and as they lived some five hundred years ago. We have only to look through this magic show glass, and we are transported back to the very scenes which were then transacted, and those early times live again before our eyes. It is not a lifeless chronicle which we read, it is not a grave description, not a careful analysis, not a logical generalization, such as the annalist and the historian furnish. It is not even an historical novel in which a writer of a later period has endea

vored to recreate the times as he conceived them, but it is an unconscious painter of the men and the manners with which he was conversant. How strong and bold-hearted were those men, how natural their manners,-how brave and sincere, how humorous and tender-hearted, how beneficent and devout were the sentiments which they express.

After a long and somewhat dreary interval, we come to the age of Shakspeare, and not to the age of Shakspeare alone, but to that of Spencer and Sidney, and Raleigh, and Hooker, and Bacon, and Ben Jonson, and the train of dramatists of whom Jonson was the representative and the head. We call this truly the golden age of English literature, and we ask what agencies could have produced such writers as these? We find our answer-first in the original force of the English stock, that under all the burdens of royal and churchly oppression, had never been corrupted or crushed, but had held its own in the halls of the gentry, the farm-houses of the yeomen, and the cottages of the laborers. This vital force was marvellously aroused by the Protestant Reformation, and when after many struggles, a Protestant Queen had come to the throne, it experienced, as it were, a thrill of newly created energy. Foreign wars, commercial adventures, romantic discoveries, all united to keep this young life excited to its utmost tension, and to move it by an inward ferment. The thoughts of men were great in those times; their hopes were unbounded; their feelings were fervent, their self-confidence was untrammeled; their power of expression was untamed. They had at their command the language not as yet shaped by critics or developed into any normal structure,-a fit instrument for the young giants, rejoicing in their strength, who were ready to use it, each as he would. Could the reader desire a study more inviting than that to which the literature of those active and hopeful days invites him? Whether he would study the authors or their times, or both together,

whether he would study the matter or the form of literature, thought, sentiment, and imagery, on the one hand, or diction, rhythm, and periodic power on the other,—he could ask for nothing more exciting or more rewarding than what is furnished here.

The age of Milton follows, and not of Milton only, but of Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, of Baxter and Bunyan, of Hobbes and Fuller. Here the English life-and with it English literature-appears in other forms, more fixed, and serious, and grave, but with not a whit of its force abated, nor aught of its fiery energy repressed. Imagination is still as soaring as ever, and the manifold and seeming exhaustless varieties of diction illustrate the resources and the plastic capacities of the English language. This period was marked for its political struggles and its religious strifes, for its intense feeling and its strong thinking; for its ardent longings and its patient endurance, and above all, for its faith in God and in man; and all these influences shaped the literature, as the literature helped to form the period.

The age of Dryden followed, and not of Dryden only, but of South, and Locke, and Boyle, and Newton. It was a tamer period, in which accuracy of thought, and exactness of language, and symmetry and conciseness of style, and repression of feeling, and caution in imagery, were all conspicuous. It was an age of repression and of criticism, as was natural after the real and imagined excesses of principle and feeling which had characterized the times of the Commonwealth,-an age in which religion declined and immorality was less restrained—an age of free thinking and unbelief which were scarcely held in check by the efforts of Locke and Boyle. With an age thus characterized by the life of the people, the literature of the period sympathized. First of all, it was the period in which the modern and the better English style was developed and fixed-pre-emi