I.

I was not to be moved by such a consideration: CHAP. the agitations of the public mind were not likely to subside speedily; and I had fondly destined my work to be an inheritance for ever2, not a contentious struggle for contemporary fame. With a like purpose, I afterwards commenced a translation of Aristotle's critical works, perceiving that to strange opinions on morals and politics, others, analogous, and equally extravagant, had succeeded in matters of taste and criticism.

From the boundless increase of books, and Growing the indefinite variety of readers of all descrip- acy of degenertions, it came to be regarded as an old and dull literature. prejudice, that the labours of the several muses should be any longer confined to their distinct provinces, or directed to their specific ends. The love of wonder, novelty, and other popular passions, it was thought, would be better gratified by jumbling together all subjects and all styles, though to the same confusion in the productions of art, that would arise in those of nature, from the multiplication of monsters. . In this manner, the public taste was gradually brought back to that decrepitude which is a second infancy, and was to be fed with food convenient for it; with rhymes in short verse, tales of wonder and witchery, and that motley brood of non-descripts, calculated to please the pruriency of wild and childish fancies: no longer tragedies or comedies,

2 Κτημα εις αιεί.

it.

CHAP. they had hitherto appeared. They alluded to I. the ethics and politics of Aristotle, of which we had been speaking, and of which Locke, in his letter to King, says, "to proceed orderly in politics, the foundation should be laid in inquiring into the nature and ground of civil society, and how it is formed into different models of government, and what are the several species of Aristotle is allowed to be a master of this science." All present pronounced the encomium to be just, but all doubted the possibility of rendering the Greek works in question, popular, or even readable in English: I was inclined, however, to make the experiment, and for a reason that appeared to myself of considerable weight. At a time when so many random opinions were afloat, originating in transient but headstrong passions, there would be much propriety, at least, in interposing the sentiments of a great master of reason, widely remote both in time and place, from the concerns and the feelings of the present day. The remark made an impression; and I was encouraged to undertake an useful and arduous, rather than a very promising

task.

I began with the " Politics," but delayed printing my translation of it, till I had finished that of the ethics; because, in Aristotle, the two subjects are inseparably connected, and treated simultaneously as integral parts of one and the same work. In this delay, I was sensible of sacrificing a certain portion of popularity; but

I.

I was not to be moved by such a consideration: CHAP. the agitations of the public mind were not likely to subside speedily; and I had fondly destined my work to be an inheritance for ever2, not a contentious struggle for contemporary fame. With a like purpose, I afterwards commenced a translation of Aristotle's critical works, perceiving that to strange opinions on morals and politics, others, analogous, and equally extravagant, had succeeded in matters of taste and criticism.

From the boundless increase of books, and Growing degenerthe indefinite variety of readers of all descrip- acy of tions, it came to be regarded as an old and dull literature. prejudice, that the labours of the several muses should be any longer confined to their distinct provinces, or directed to their specific ends. The love of wonder, novelty, and other popular passions, it was thought, would be better gratified by jumbling together all subjects and all styles, though to the same confusion in the productions of art, that would arise in those of nature, from the multiplication of monsters.. In this manner, the public taste was gradually brought back to that decrepitude which is a second infancy, and was to be fed with food convenient for it; with rhymes in short verse, tales of wonder and witchery, and that motley brood of non-descripts, calculated to please the pruriency of wild and childish fancies: no longer tragedies or comedies,

I.

CHAP. but DRAMATIC works not intended to be acted, wire-drawn biographies of such men as never lived, histories without facts, philosophy without principles, poetry without harmony, and oratory, supplying by loquacity and petulance, the want of pathos and argument.

State of criticism.

In the space of the last thirty years, literature has thus degenerated in the two most conspicuous countries of modern Europe, more than it had done in Rome in the period of 140 years, from Cicero to the younger Pliny; and more than it did in Greece in the course of many centuries. This applies generally to thought and diction; to compositions to be read in the closet, or pronounced in public assemblies; and it cannot be doubted that the inaccuracy and diffuseness of speeches, now so numerous, and by orators of all classes, has contributed to the deterioration of our written style, and, together with coarser blemishes, given to it that vaporous pomp and tinsel texture which characterised, of old, the Asiatic and Alexandrian school, and contrasted it with the pure Atticism, to which our classic authors, both in prose and verse, had long successfully aspired.

We have, however, critics and critical reviewers in abundance: how comes it that their voice has not been raised against such vile innovations? I answer, these arbiters of elegance have gone over, themselves, into the camp of the enemy. They discerned the signs of the times. They discovered that the exclusive appetite for satire

I.

and satirical novels, had destroyed all relish for CHAP. any kind of food which had not the novel flavour: and that even works of learning must assume that form, if they aspired to be fashionable. Cultivating letters, not as the first of elegant pursuits, but as a mere trade, many of the workmen employed soon saw that this was a trade that might be carried on successfully, with little other stock but that of presumption and knavery. They did not combat an author to invest themselves in his spoils; they first stole his arms, then turned them insidiously against him. Instead of looking upwards to their superiors in knowledge for fair fame, they looked downwards to the multitude for sordid lucre ridicule or ribaldry was opposed to truth and reason; the soundest arguments were encountered by a sarcasm or a sneer; and in favour of the new school, of which they were devoted partisans, many of our noblest authors were greatly depreciated, and some of the ablest of them treated with no small degree of studied contumely. There were no bounds to the idle loquacity of critics, without name and without shame; and no cessation to the thick vollies of words, which they emitted, without ever once hitting the point in question.

'Mr. Knight, (Inquiry into Taste, Part iii. chap. iii. p. 452;) well observes, "that the habit which young people get, of reading for events, without any attention to language, thought, or sentiment completely unnerves all their powers of application, and makes them, incapable of learning or retaining any thing. The mind, like the body," he says, "may be thus reduced to a state of atrophy, in which knowsledge, like food, may pass through it without adding eithe to it strength, its bulk, or its beauty."