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LECTURES

ON

ENGLISH POETRY.

LECTURE THE FIRST.

INTRODUCTORY ANALYSIS.

General Historical Summary:-The Age of Edward the Third: -Chaucer :-The Ages of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth:-Coincidences in the Literary Histories of England and Spain :-The Age of Charles the First :-Milton :The New School of Comedy:-The Age of Queen Anne-Compared with the Age of Elizabeth :-The Didactic Writers :-Improvement in the Public Taste:Modern Authors to the time of Cowper.

It may appear somewhat presumptuous to hope to interest your attention, by a series of Lectures upon English Poetry, after the power and ability

Iwith which the Mechanical and useful Arts have so recently been discussed and explained, on the same spot, and the wonders and mysteries of those Sciences laid open, which contribute so much to the happiness, the comforts, and even the necessities, of ordinary life. In introducing Poetry to your notice, I am constrained to confess that it is a mere superfluity and ornament. As Falstaff said of Honour," it cannot set to a leg, or an arm, or heal the grief of a wound; it has no skill in Surgery." Still, within the mind of man there exists a craving after intellectual beauty and sublimity. There is a mental appetite, which it is as necessary to satisfy as the corporeal one. There are maladies of the mind, which are even more destructive than those of the body; and which, as the sound of the sweet Harp of David drove the demon out of Saul, have been known to yield to the soothing influence of Poetry. The earliest accomplishment of the rudest and wildest stages of society, it is also the crowning grace of the most polished and civilized. Nations the most illustrious in Arts and arms, have also been the most celebrated for their cultivation of letters; and when the monuments of those Arts, and the achievements of those arms, have passed away from the face of the earth, they have transmitted their fame to the

remotest ages through the medium of Literature alone. The genius of Timanthes lives but in the pages of Pliny; and the sword of Cæsar has been rendered immortal only by his pen.

The canvas fritters into shreds, and the column moulders into ruin; the voice of Music is mute; and the beautiful expression of Sculpture a blank and gloomy void: the right hand of the Mechanist forgets it's cunning, and the arm of the Warrior becomes powerless in the grave; but the Lyre of the Poet still vibrates; ages listen to his song and honour it and while the pencil of Apelles, and the chisel of Phidias, and the sword of Cæsar, and the engines of Archimedes, live only in the breath of tradition, or on the page of history, or in some perishable and imperfect fragment; the pen of Homer, or of Virgil, or of Shakspeare, is an instrument of power, as mighty and magical as when first the gifted finger of the Poet grasped it, and with it traced those characters which shall remain unobliterated, until the period when this great globe itself,

"And all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like an insubstantial Pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind!"

The history of the Poetry of England exhibits

changes and revolutions not less numerous and remarkable than that of it's politics; and to a brief general summary of these, I propose to confine myself in this Introductory Lecture. I shall afterwards take a more detailed review of the merits of the individual Authors, who distinguished themselves at various periods; and in drawing your attention to particular passages in their works, I shall select from such writers as are least extensively known.

English Poetry may be said to have been born in the reign of Edward the Third. The Monkish rhymes, the Troubadour Poems, the Metrical Romances of Thomas the Rhymer, Piers Plowman, and others, and the clumsy Translations from the Latin and the French, which were produced prior to that period, have but slender claims upon our attention; except as affording, by their dulness and their gloom, a contrast to the extraordinary blaze of light which succeeded them, when Chaucer appeared in the Poetical hemisphere. At that period, the eyes of all Europe were turned towards England, who, perhaps, never in any age more highly distinguished herself. She then produced a Monarch who was the greatest Statesman and Warrior of his age, and to whom we are indebted for the foundation of many of the most im

portant of the free Institutions, under which we now flourish; she produced a Divine, who had the boldness to defy the spiritual and temporal authority of Rome, and who struck the first blow at that colossal power, -a blow, from the effects of which we may say that she has never yet recovered; and now she produced a Poet, of whom it is scarcely too much to assert, that he was the greatest who had then appeared in modern Eu

rope.

Chaucer's genius was vast, versatile, and original. He seems to have been deeply versed in classical, in French, and in Italian Literature, as well as in the Sciences, so far as they were known in his day, and in the polemical and theological questions which were then the favourite and fashionable studies. His knowledge of human nature was profound. The Knights, the Monks, the Reves, the Prioresses, which he has painted, have long since disappeared; but wherever we > look around, we recognise the same passions, and feelings, and characters; the features remain, although the costume is altered; manners vary, but man remains the same: Human nature, however changeable in fashion, opinion, and outward appearance, is immutable in it's essence. Such as is the Monarch on his throne, such is the peasant

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