years. It would even be possible to turn these duties into an instrument of protection, if we found ourselves in danger of being outstripped in manufacturing by the Germans, in consequence of the cheapness of labour, as by taking their corn and timber, we should very soon deprive them of the advantage they possessed. The difficulty of certifying the growth of the corn exported from a country so extensive and so variously governed as Germany, seems to be the only obstacle to a successful experiment's being immediately made in this way with the league itself. Of course, it would not answer the purpose to allow the grain exported to be replaced from Russia and Austria.

We may add, with regard to the suggestion here made, that something ought to be done without loss of time to confirm the states of the north-western league in the policy which they have hitherto observed. If they were all in possession of popular forms of government, the example of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck shows that the sense of their own interests would keep them firm in a liberal cause. But princes, even at the present day, are apt to measure the prosperity of the nation over which they rule, not by the fullness of their subjects' purses, but by the amount of their own civil lists. This tendency has been strongly manifested since the accession of King Ernest to the throne of Hanover; and the example of the south German governments, which we have pointed out, is a tempting one. The Prussian uniform and military system has been adopted at Hanover, in preference to the British colours and regulations, without any such powerful recommendation; and even a seeming sympathy of feeling with one party in England is not likely to outweigh the force of that passion which is said to augment with years.

We have not allowed ourselves to be deterred from giving this simple and intelligible survey of the true position of our commercial relations with the German states, through the fear of standing alone and unsupported by any party upon the new ground on which we have ventured. The duty of the scientific reasoner is to investigate the connection existing between isolated facts, and to hold up to view the soundness or weakness of arguments, on whatever side they may be advanced.

With the accomplishment of this task his re

sponsibility ceases, and he leaves it to those whose attention is directed to carrying out practically the suggestions of interest, to adapt the means which they can command to the difficulties which they have to overcome. If we appear to have deprived the advocates of free trade and the abolition of corn-law restrictions of one argument which they have long put forward, we have furnished them with another in its place, which has the advantage of being able to stand the test of inquiry. If the phantom of a dreaded rivalry on the part of continental manufacturers be dispelled, the picture of a country endeavouring to cherish a special branch of industry by artificial means, and failing in the attempt, is laid open to console the friends of a liberal commercial policy, and as a warning to those who advocate restrictions.

ARTICLE V.

Pindari Carmina. 2 vols. 8vo. Edid. L. DISSENIUS, Gottingensis. Gothæ, 1830.

As in every constitution the three elements of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy must exist, and as the predominance of any one of these gradually gives way to the others in their turn, so we believe that it will be found to be with the lyric, epic and dramatic in poetry. Every poem must have a general form and frame of unity, with a progressive development from the beginning through the middle to the end, and this is its epos. Every poem must have intensity and passionate reflection; this makes it for so far lyrical; and, again, there can be no thought without contrast, difference and distinction, and thus the dramatic element must be admitted. It is easy in the complete organization of the epos to trace the dramatic and the lyric principles, and even their perfect forms, comprehended under and subordinated to the total effect; as for instance, in Paradise Lost,' the opening is purely lyric, the second book dramatic, and yet the whole is decisively epic. In the drama we see the epic form in small, at a distance as it

were; while the characters occupy the foreground, and the lyrical nature of every soliloquy and general sentiment is apparent; for even the versification, on such occasions, swells into fuller forms, and admits a more decided emphasis. Such are Hamlet's reflections, or Othello's lament, for the great scenery of the battle-field. Of the ode the lowest and most imperfect form is the mere song, the musical expression of feeling; but even here there must be several sentences, and a coherence between them; a point from which the sentiment sets out, and a conclusion at which it arrives; consequently an essential unity; and thus a little epos, latent in these primary molecules of poetry. It is more difficult to detect their dramatic character; but the contrast generally made of the opposite sentiment with that which prevails, is intrinsically dramatic: as Ariel's little songs are the very breath of extempore music, and yet his various relations with the bee, the bat and the owl, his summer playfellows, might be drawn out into a series of situations and actions. It is evident, however, that though each form of poetry, or of thought at all, must contain these elements, that poem only can approach towards being anything of a proper image of "the fullness of the stature " of the whole man, which allows each of the three a proportionate share, and an adequate repre

sentation.

Perhaps, however, what we mean will be seen more distinctly, if viewed on a larger scale. There are three great classes into which all human consciousness may be divided. We may view mankind, and the destiny of man, as a vast system, external to our immediate selves, and developing itself, according to certain great laws, throughout the sphere of space and time allotted to it, and of which past, present, and future make up the integral and inseparable parts. Again, by a kind of abstraction, which is however the ordinary habit of the mind of sense, we view ourselves shut up in the ignorant present, and the whole force of each of our individual beings brought out by contact and collision with our fellow individuals; struggling, as it were, in the dark, and groping on our way from moment to moment. There is yet a third point of view from which the former two appear at least in some degree united; the universality of things no

longer remaining cold and distant, past or future, nor the individual pent up in the infinitesimal present; but all three mysteriously combined in one. From these essential divisions, when embodied in literature, proceed the three corresponding classes of human art and knowledge, history, oratory and philosophy; and when disengaged from reality, and volatilized by the imagination, epic, dramatic and lyric poetry. The vast cycle of Providence, the opus quod operatur Deus ab initio, in which all individual existences appear as unconscious causes and effects, predominated over by a supreme will, and in following which the great end of the whole is made so present to us as to overpower our sympathy with the finite beings involved therein, is the idea of the epos. Accordingly we find in such a poem a calm intellectual evenness of tone, a sort of fresco impartiality and totality of effect. In the drama, on the contrary, the intellectual generalizing power is at its minimum, and the feelings are magnified into the utmost intensity; the whole will of man being concentrated as much as possible into each moment of time, and there struggling in vain with the other elements of human nature, which it has, to a certain degree, excluded, and which, consequently, appear to it ab extra, as ruthless destiny. But not so in the philosophic lyric: here the present is present, immediate and intense; but the past and the future are with it, are one with it, and infuse into it a grandeur not its own.

We do not mean to say that all epic poems are passionless, or all plays hopeless, or all odes inspired; but we do believe that the more any poem bears one or other of these three characters distinctly stamped on it, the more forcible it will be, the more ideal and real at the same time. A poem ought to have such a decided character, as bodying forth some one of the above-mentioned moments of thought; but it should attain this without the exclusion of the other elements, or else it becomes an arbitrary abstraction, can never permanently please, or produce the calm and deep effect of a true work of art, such as the Iliad of Homer, the tragedies of Shakspeare, or the odes of Pindar.

To confine ourselves at present more especially to the latter form, that of the ode. It may be said that the greater

part of the lyrics of Horace, and the ancient poets whom he followed, Alcæus, Sappho, and others of the Æolian school, are totally devoid of that philosophic character which we have been contending for as essential to the ode. These poems are indeed, for the most part, merely songs or occasional verses, composed upon various occurrences in the author's life, and expressing nothing more than the feelings of the moment, without any but, because, or therefore. For so much, then, they are but soliloquies from the real drama of life; yet there is in them a truly lyrical element, and that is their versification. In the very act of turning our passions into poetry, their immediate interjectional intensity loses its focus, is generalized, and the intellect descends in a friendly disguise to remind us of such things as law, measure, harmony, which draw off our attention from ourselves, and diffuse it into the universality of the world. Let the subjectmatter, then, of a song be as unintellectual as possible, and approach ever so nearly to the mere assertion of 'I grieve,' or 'I rejoice,' the metre is the ideal element which asserts itself in the unconscious mind. Hence, too, it is easy to see why the versification is of so much more prominent importance in the lyric than in the other two kinds of poetry; while the epos tends to one monotonous recurrence, and the drama tends to prose. The strophè, or wheel as Shakspeare calls it, which the Æolians invented, is the most immediate expression of that state of mind in which all lyric poetry originates. The mind, strongly excited, creates an image of itself in certain forms of metre, and then pauses. Again, if the same feeling predominate, another effort, and again a pause, and so on. Now though this pause is doubtless the same with that which there must be in all versification at the end of each line, it is more decided, more emphatic, in order to express the more actual presence of the poet's individual self; and as much more strong as this recurrence of sameness is, this stamp of the poet's subjective will, so much more variety and richness may be comprehended within it, than in the less definite line-verses. It was therefore most unhappily and inappropriately, we think, that this form was transferred by the later Italian poets to the narrative epic. But the exquisite harmony of Petrarch had so taken possession of the Italian ear, that they