with the elder worthies of Rome, or the lofty position she then occupied in the eye of the world, a stately and solemn grandeur. This admirable balance of mind which distinguishes Horace, and informs all his writings with such pregnant good sense, renders him a peculiar favourite in a country like our own, whose national character is marked by not a few of those features that distinguished the mind of the poet. Hence his odes are more read and quoted, particularly by men of business and practical sagacity, than the works of any of the classic poets.

But the merits of Horace, though most conspicuous as a lyric poet, are great also as a satirist. Lucilius had indeed made the first approach to the regular form of Roman satire; but his rude and harsh effusions can no more be compared to the polished and graceful productions of Horace, than the rugged verses of Donne can be compared with the satires and epistles of Pope. In Horace all follies and lighter vices of the day (for he seemed to think satire scarcely a fit weapon when directed against the darker vices) are touched on in a strain of the most urbane ridicule, which insinuates reproof. As compared with those either of Lucilius who preceded, or of Persius and Juvenal who succeeded him, the tone of the Horatian satire is light and playful. It has been correctly observed, that these satires filled up for Roman literature exactly the department which in our times is occupied by the stage. For as the plays of Plautus and Terence truly represented Greek and not Roman manners, it was in the light form of satire that all those humorous follies and oddities of Roman society, which properly fall within the range of the comic, were displayed and exposed.

The elegiac poets of this period, Tibullus and Proper

tius, wrote with purity and good taste; the former with more of tenderness, the latter with more of force and mental vigour. But in the extravagant luxuriance and frequent conceits of Ovid, we perceive the commencement of that decline of poetry, which, relieved only by the manly vigour of Juvenal's satires, goes on in rapidly-increasing progression to the extinction of the Roman empire. For the amatory and elegiac poems of Ovid little can be said; they want heart and passion as much as delicacy or propriety of sentiment. But the praise of a teeming fancy cannot be denied to him; he is a mine from which thoughts and expressions may be dug without end; and his Metamorphoses, as a graceful exposition of the finest mythological tales of antiquity, will always retain their interest for modern times.

We pass over the so-called tragedies of Seneca, the works of a mere school rhetorician; and the satires of Persius, obscure and rugged, though not without a masculine energy. But the name of Juvenal must be mentioned as the last great poetical name that illustrates this period of decline. In the finer portions of his satires, for it must be admitted they contain a good deal that is level and prosaic enough, he displays the highest talents for this species of poetry; the strength of his language, the fire of his invective, correspond with the gigantic character of the vices which he exposes. But a certain air of exaggeration mingles with and alloys the effect of his censures; we are led to think of the doubtful character of his own life, and to question the title of the moralist to raise the scourge which he applies with such severity to others. A tinge, in short, of that rhetorical and formal character which his mind appears to have contracted in the schools of declamation attaches to his poetry,

and leaves an impression of hollowness and insincerity upon the mind.

Lucan's Pharsalia, it must be recollected, was a comparatively boyish effort; but it seems plain, from the character of his mind, that he wanted the highest of the poetical faculties, imagination. He uttered bold and striking thoughts occasionally in the happiest words. No poems afford finer specimens of single lines for quotation than Lucan. But the whole is destitute of poetical warmth; it blazes only with a phosphoric fire. Quinctilian has, in fact, hit with admirable tact the character of Lucan's mind in the remark," Si dicam quod sentio, oratoribus magis quam poetis annumerandus."

We shall not here touch upon the remaining writers who feebly kept alive the vestal fire of poetry up to the period of the overthrow of the Roman empire of the west; Statius, Claudian, or Ausonius. Even the introduction of Christianity, much as it did towards improving morality, not only among its votaries, but amongst the Pagan nations themselves, could not re-animate to new life the worn-out and enervated frame of literature. That could only be effected by sweeping away entirely the old landmarks, making a new heaven and a new earth, creating new associations in all the ideas of men, giving them new hopes, aspirations, and pursuits, and thus restoring that elastic principle of moral and mental vigour, of faith and enthusiastic feeling, out of which all high poetry must spring. From the rude but warlike and uncorrupted nations of the North, was to come that influence which was to give a new aspect to society; at first, like the descent of a deluge, sweeping the remains of cultivation before it, but ultimately depositing and carrying deep into the bosom of the soil the elements of a reviving and healthy fertility.

POETRY OF MODERN EUROPE.

FROM the fall of the Roman empire of the West, about the close of the fifth century after Christianity, to the appearance of the first great poet of modern Europe, Dante, an interval of seven dreary centuries elapses, a period characterized in popular language by the epithet of the dark ages. During this period the chaos resulting from the overthrow of the old Pagan constitution in religion, government, laws, and social institutions, was gradually settling into shape; the new religion was incorporating itself with and imparting a new form to social life; new laws superseding the subtile and complex jurisprudence of Rome, new languages growing out of its ruins. During the greater part of the period to which we have alluded, literature, in any high sense of the word, did not exist; but the materials of new literatures were accumulating, and the spirit which was to give them breath and vitality, when language should be sufficiently settled for the purpose, was developing itself, though manifesting itself in other fields and departments than that of poetry. When poetry re-appeared in the thirteenth century, the influence of the intermediate changes which the human mind had undergone became visible in certain marked traits, separating by the broadest distinctive lines the character of the modern European from the ancient classical poetry. A few of these, as applicable to all

the modern literatures of Europe, though with differences in degree, may be indicated before proceeding to any notice of these separate literatures.

1. The first and most important is the influence of the Christian religion on the productions of the imagination.

The Pagan religions were mere religions of the fancy; they were nothing but the poetry of humanity. They dealt only with the palpable and the material; and by the combination of the finest features of the actual, they produced an ideal which each moulded to his own fancy. The conceptions of the infinite and the immaterial they avoided. The solemn and the mournful found no place in their thoughts, or, if such ideas did intrude, they were made use of as arguments for present enjoyment. Let us eat and drink, seems the moral of paganism; let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

From this materialism of the ancient mythology, and its purely imaginative character, the results were, 1st, great clearness in all its conceptions and its expressions, that clearness which is imparted by the absence of all that is not palpable to sense; 2d, a light and cheerful tone, the natural product of that mental indifference, and absence of serious reflection, which the disbelief, or as least doubt of immortality, would produce; 3d, the feeling of beauty as the object aimed at and accomplished, and the vital principle of all the classical creations.

Very different were the character and the influence of Christianity. This was a revelation, not a creation of the fancy. It spoke to the heart, to the hopes and fears of men, not merely to their imaginations. The outlines of the Christian theology were communicated in a fixed and settled form, with which fancy could not deal at will, or mould