the day has, of late years, found its way into our periodical literature. Such being the state of the time, there is nothing in literature apart from its distortions and unnatural stimuli, to occupy the attention of the better portion of the public intellect. They who have taste and leisure find it necessary to go back to the period of a more sterling nature. But the exigencies of business, or the love of artificial excitement, such as may be satisfied by the dregs of the circulating libraries, supply the whole of the demand for the multifarious, but corrupt and surface literature of the day. This vicious state of things is much aggravated by reaction, from the tone of intercourse it has caused. The conversation of eminent men has no attraction, no refined sparkle of wit, no profound remark, no play of comment and criticism, no attic repose; their speaking, nothing of standard eloquence. This, to be sure, is as it should be; we are not the fools to censure. In the stirring strife of the age, no leading mind can stay to puzzle about the humanities we claim no proud exemption from the taint of the time, or the infirmities of human nature. We frankly plead guilty to these charges, if such they can be called: in our composition we are not always too fastidious in language, or over nice in harmony we cannot always resist the temptation of glitter without appropriateness and the noble desire to emancipate poetry from those severe laws which were once supposed to constitute its peculiar character and charm and we feel, like our brother bards, that the composition of verse is much facilitated by adopting the loose periods of a fustian prose. We would not be thought fastidious in these days of literary license, and trust for our excuse to the frankness of our confession. But the truth must be told; literature is for the present, like many better things, broken up and deprived of its higher influences. We are in one of those dull cycles which have often come round to damp the spirit of every age; we have revolved to the days of Hayley, and the della Cruscan school. We are not, like that emasculated school, devoid of matter, and prolix without sense. Our error is in the other extreme; instead of style without sense,

:

our fault is circumstantial dulness without attention to style. But the result is, there is no public feeling in favor of literature, and there is nothing in literature to merit such a feeling. We do not, however, wish to derive strength from exaggeration; and on this point, there is one remark which we cannot pass in silence. It is very usual to refer the whole of the ill success of literary speculations to the apathy of the public.This we believe to be an overstatement. Nothing worthy of success in any eminent degree, has now, or at any time, failed to attract the degree of attention to which it has been entitled by its merits. On the contrary, in the dullest of times, the public has its favourites in the absence of higher names, the writers of the cockney school are read; and there is a stir and bustle among the publishers which, for a moment, appears opposed to our theory. But there is a solution for this difficulty. The vast increase of the middle order has brought with it a proportional influx of minds and interests into the field of intellectual and commercial action; a vast increase both of readers and writers is the consequence, and with it an increase of trade, which indicates nothing but the merely numerical increment which has caused it. Every one reads more or lesstracts, compilations, abstracts, abridgments, and elementary treatises, altogether unconnected with literature, (in its idiomatic sense,) form the better part of this reading. The ornamental publications, which owe their chief attractions to embellishment, and which swell their bulk with prose and verse that no one thinks of reading, occupy a large share of this trade, and hold to literature the place which the modern puppet-shows of the stage obtain with respect to the legitimate drama. A vast multiplicity of readers, has cre ated a demand for books: but even this is magnified to observation, by another consequence, distinct from any we have mentioned: the vast production of works which have no circulation and no readers. These are published at the expense of their authors, and afford no measure of the public market. We have stated these facts with sparing moderation, and with the consciousness of treading on delicate

ledge.

ground. There is a partizanship in the time, that affects all subjects which are open to the discussions of opinion: and we write in fear of giving offence to the fanaticism of schools, the admirers and idolaters of the vices of great men.

All changes find their period. The time cannot be far remote for the restoration of literature to its legitimate form and influence. There are heads and hearts enough, which have not bowed the knee to Baal; and a few leading writers, in the seasonable moment will suffice to bring back a more regulated and principled tone, to the public taste. It only requires that the attention of the more solid intellects as yet absorbed in more vital operations, should be turned to the cultivation of letters and the arts of peace; to redeem them from the hands of the old women and children, who have the field to themselves. The undigested mass of new thoughts and words will become digested and assimilated by skill and labour-and other Popes and Addisons will arise to chasten, harmonize, and simplify, to clear and purify the well of" English undefiled."

But we must return to our intent. It was, so far, our object to fix the general state of literature, from which alone all particular views can be justly comprehended; and we were also desirous to make it appear that we do not lay too much stress on causes exclusively local. Our literature is that of England-we are substantially English in name, laws, and prospects. We have had the full benefit of the literature of England, and must partake of its changes. The effects we have been noticing can be traced here also. Not among our publishers or book marts--for these we have not had--but in our social circles and public institutions. Like our intellectual nurse, our social and forensic tones are changed from what they were. An apathy of taste reigns, attributable to the same causes, which lay like a leaden spell upon the British world. A spirit of utilities governs the tongue and pen with its untrimmed and feeble, though full and useful style-its naked details, and diffuse but unprincipled reasonings. Wit and classic allusion have long ceased to throw their graceful and fascinating lustre over the intercourse and conduct of public men. The time has passed when a moral axiom was thought important enough to be gravely bandied between the bench and the bar;

but when wit was carried to perfection; when deep and leading truths were expressed with the strength and power of dignified simplicity, and when a chaste and pointed precision of style gave evidence to the reigning spirit from which they came. Though, properly speaking, we have had no literature; yet such was the pervading influence of the day of Flood and Grattan, and their cotemporaries, which not only ruled the listening senate, or gave at traction to the popular pamphlet, but pervaded domestic life.

No literature had yet taken root in Ireland, except a trifling and occasiona. appearance of pamphlets, which, from their uniformly specific purpose, were confined to shed their glow-worm radiance on trivial points of local or ephemeral interest The spirit of the time did not favour the colonization of literature into Ireland; it was not in such a state of circumstances that it might be expected to begin; for such is the consideration important to be kept in view.

But there was another very pecu.

liar process going on in Ireland to corrupt the taste and partially to obscure our national reputation.The public speaker, as will ever be the case, found it necessary to accommodate his style to its purposes: - and the peculiar state of the country called forth a style of rhetoric, adapted to please the most uncultivated ear and understanding. Clouds of sublimated nonsense," the melancholy madness of poetry"-drew thunders of applause from listening streets. The miserable caut of a barbaric patriotism was tricked out in the waste of poetical commonplaces, and adorned with the meretricious tinsel of extravagant conceits and metaphors, which seemed to have sense and propriety, because they were not understood:-real talent set off, and occasionally redeemed this sad degeneracy-Sheil and O'Connell could not be without meaning; but their followers and adinirers made sad work.—For a moment popular admiration was made an argument in behalf of the extravagances by which it was won. But this could not last; the Edinburgh Review broke the spell, and Irish eloquence fell in the market. Such demonstrations could do little to excite the better portion of our mind.

Let us now briefly notice the operation of this state of things on the populace of Ireland. It is not more

important with reference to the subject, than it is itself strange and anomalous; presenting to the observer, a singular combination of barbarism and civilization, affecting the same class, and involving the self-same intellects, in the strong glare of contrasted light and darkness.

Over by far the larger districts of the country, if an intelligent stranger were to have full means to observe the manners, the moral principles and training, the opinions and knowledge of the peasantry, he might well feel as one transported some two centuries backward in the scale of progress. If, on the other hand, the same observer were to introduce among these seem ingly simple and undisciplined barbarians, questions of national theology and politics, and really contrive to draw them into the sincere exertion of their understandings, he would be equally astonished to observe a nice ness of logical tact-an intelligence in the politics of the day-and generally a progress in that casuistry, which depends exclusively on the native power or the habitual use of the mere intellect -such as might do no discredit to Maynooth. Such is the anomalous inequality, which, whether we have exaggerated it or not, exists to obscure the question as to our real state of advance. While we must be allowed to stand below the level of English and Scottish civilization, in all its more momentous elements, we stand at the lowest on a level with them in the mere development of intellectual power. To shew the little value, or indeed serious disadvantage of this condition, would be to digress widely from the purpose we have in view But we may advantageously notice its

obvious cause.

While a dominant superstition, of which it is the vital principle to depress the advances of the mind in every direction, has with other familiar causes

of a historical and political kind, conspired to foster ignorance and retard civilization, a violent political fermentation, with the causes of which, our discussion is not involved, has operated as a powerful stimulant on the national mind, and awakened all the faculties of a people-by nature shrewd and observant - into their intensest action. These dispositions have found a school in the political arena, only inferior in power and mischievous efficiency to the mob-oratory which produced very similar effects in the "fierce democracy" of Ancient Greece. The ear for oratorical effects

the logical sense-the expansive tact that brings the mind into contact with events, have been fostered and matured at the public hustings and at the agitation meetings. But the sole food which has been thus imbibed, has been from the misstatements of faction-partial views of fact-fallacious principles and all the prejudices and ignorances which have ever formed the material an ammunition of party warfare. Thus trained, developed and furnished with a system of specious fallacies, cunningly interwoven with the grievous realities of their condition, the bulk of the Irish peasantry exhibit a singular mixture of cultivation and barbarism—of shrewdness and ignorance-of sensitiveness and brutality-of meanness and moral elevation.

These considerations are capable of an application far more extensive than it is our desire to give them. For while a highly educated class is also to be found throughont the country, existing rather within itself, than in contact with the public mind, the body of the Irish gentry is also in no small measure affected by causes arising out of the same state of things. close propinquity and personal nature of the causes of political excitement, seem to have given them an exclusive possession of the mind. Men are classed

The

by their party feelings, and rather to be characterised by the colour of their creed, than by any personal attribute. The gentry of Ireland are Whigs and Tories. And while the civilization of the 19th century sits in the twilight of the darker ages, a fierce conflict, fiercely carried on, suppresses, obstructs, and confines the diffusion of the mental element of civilization. There is thus on every side, broadly and plainly visible, a diffusion of moral and intellectual action, quite distinct from the humanizing principles of knowledge or education—a spurious vitality in the nature of disease, in which faction only derives growth by which thought and talent, sentiment and opinion, abundantly called forth, are shaped as they rise to the narrow views of the day, and moulded to the blind expediencies of either party. Every thing is looked on by public feeling through this misty medium, and nothing is rightly appreciated that does not in some way connect itself with public events and party notions; while, to the convulsions of party are added the noise of theological contentions, and the struggles of ecclesiastical defence.

It should indeed be noticed before we leave this topic, that the obstacles to progress, which we have here been explaining, were the more likely to be protracted, that there has been no very decided principle of counteraction. In former times, as still, the mind of Ireland received its impulses from the maturer action of that of England; but England has itself been, for the same period, the stage of a complex revolution, of very varied and of opposite effects as regards this subject. If we consider this with a view to her political influences on Ireland, one sentence must here express our opinion :—she has made this country, itself convulsed from end to end, the arena of a revolutionary contest. But the same contest, though it has been far from shaking in the same degree the mature structure of the social system in England, has there, as here, long since arrested and withered the germs from which literature derives its growth; the public ear is there almost as dull as here, to all that concerns not the feelings of party. This is, however, not an abiding condition: political excitement itself wears out, or with its causes, subsides. And there is in the vast accession of knowledge-of principles of language and of educated minds,

a powerful reaction preparing in favor of an advance more exclusively moral and intellectual. There is in educated man, in proportion as he rises in the scale of mind, a tendency to strive after permanent principles and results; and though public virtue, or self-interest, or vanity, may draw men wholly into the collisions of ephemeral questions and parties-yet these having subsided, the calmer and more abiding interests, and the more profound and elevated realms of truth, excellence and beauty, obtain the preference of the intellectual part of our nature.

Having now taken as large a compass as we think necessary for a superficial and popular view of the prospects and advantages of Irish literature, other topics of more immediate connexion with the subject present themselves:-our actual capabilities; the obstacles that exist to retard us; the efforts which have failed; the progress we have made; the objects to be gained by success; the necessary conditions of that success; and the means we have to pursue.

Our actual capabilities are, we are inclined to believe, much undervalued. Every one who is practically conversant with the opinions of Ireland and the Irish, abroad, must be aware that the general estimate of our moral and intellectual condition is of the lowest. In Germany, France, Italy, in fact, through Europe, and still more in America, our island may be said to represent the ancient ultima Thule of civilization.

The vast capabilities of this country for literary pursuit, are in fact concealed by the overpowering demand of the English marts. Whatever is produced here is consumed there. The better portion of our mind is absorbed into the sphere of the ascendant genius of England, and thus our real progress is concealed from the eyes of the world. Neither is it only America, which has but a fortuitous knowledge of our existence, or France, which all but excludes us from the scale of literary existence; but indeed England, our sister, with whom we have so long taken sweet counsel—in England, while there is an exaggerated notion of our wit and imagination, nothing can be more observable than the very low opinion which there exists as to our state of civilization, and of our literary pretensions.

The causes of this impression are not foreign from our purpose.