once an entire member of their work,-a secret of criticism which, unhappily, few of our classical scholars possess; for these gentlemen judge a man's scholarship by the neatness and prosody of his quotations from Horace, and their knowledge of the great writers of their own and other tongues is ofttimes more correct than organic; but the poet and the writer who works from a central, living principle, must work from a consciousness very different from that of the analyst, or dissector. English treatises of criticism too often resemble a hand-book called the Dublin Dissector, which the student holds in his left hand open, while, with the scalpel in his right, he separates the integument from the muscle. The treatise of Lessing, on the contrary, deserves to be called an, organic treatise, because it shows us the vital principle in the living work. seems to be a creator, or inventor, in the right sense. America has produced many authors who have excelled in the description of natural scenery. Every one is familiar with the exquisite delineations of Bryant and Longfellow, in those beautiful and pathetic little poems, "The Water-fowl," and the "Loss of the Hesperus." There are touches in these of natural description unsurpassed in their kind. Many of equal or superior beauty are quoted by the readers of Tennyson; but these excellent poets do not describe for the sake of describing; they do not encroach upon the province of the landscape painter; they speak only of what we have seen and are familiar with, and then give us the changes, dramatic motives and pathetic incidents, which the phenomena of nature occasion, attend, or suggest. They combine in their poems the two-fold genius of ode and elegy; the elegy describing and lamenting past scenes, the ode, interior passions of an instant. In all that they write there is motion and life, and therefore, we dare say, they are popular and admired. In the seventeenth section our author dwells at length upon the impropriety of detailed delineations of bodily objects in poetry. The signs of speech are arbitrary. When a word is uttered, or written, it signifies nothing to the hearer or reader except by reference to his own experience. The poet cannot describe a thing which no one general, the power of delineating a bodily whole, "I do not deny," says Lessing, "to speech in has ever seen, so that the imagination shall by means of its separate parts; this it possesses, receive it. He can describe only the changes, because its signs, although consecutive, are yet arcombinations, and actions of things that bitrary. But I deny that this power is possessed have been seen and are already known, or by speech, considered as the mechanical means of which the imagination shapes from experi- would be deficient in that illusion on which poepoetry, because such verbal delineations of bodies ence, or from pictorial representations. Mil- try mainly rests; and for this plain reason, that ton's angels have a human form, speak the the entireness of the body being destroyed by the English language, and their music was the consecutive nature of the discourse, and an analmusic known to Milton; their armor is that ysis of the whole into its parts being thus effected, the ultimate reunion of those parts, in the imag of English knights, their artillery the mod-ination, must always be a work of very great diffiern cannon. Thus, in the detail of his work, the greatest of all inventors invented nothing. He could change, he could magnify; he could darken and illuminate, combine and put in action; he could inspire his angels with the great passion familiar to his own spirit; he could give them the theology and the skepticism which agitated his own intellect, and there invention ceased. His learning fills out the work coldly and heavily, the pedant and poet contending for mastery; his detailed descriptions of things without action, leave the imagination dull and stagnant; but when he puts in motion the angelic hosts, we hear the clash of armor, the sound of chariot-wheels, and the thunder of artillery-your bosoms burn with the ardor of the fight-and then the poet culty, and in many cases would even be impossible. Where, therefore, no illusive effect is required, where the understanding of the reader alone is addressed, and where the only aim of the author is to convey distinct, and, as far as possible, complete ideas, those delineations of bodies which are excluded from poetry, properly so called, may with perfect propriety be introduced, and may be employed with much advantage not only by the prose writer, but by the didactic poet, who is, in fact, no poet at all." Lessing quotes instances from Virgil of purely didactic and descriptive poetry, which are only a more agreeable paraphrase of prose, and exhibit skill in language, and a knowledge of husbandry, and nothing more. lineation of bodily objects-without the Homeric "Except in such cases as these, the detailed deartifice of rendering co-existent parts actually con secutive, to which I have already alluded--has | portant figures are at rest. "When the judgment of Pope had become matured by years and experience, he looked back, we are told, with great contempt on the pictorial essays of his youthful muse. He insisted that it was indispensable for any one who desired to render himself really worthy of the name of a poet, to renounce as early as possible the taste for dry delineation; and compared a merely descriptive poem to a feast composed of nothing but sauces." Lessing recommends that the poet who has conceived a work in which a series of images are brought forward, with sentiments sparingly interwoven, should change his plan, and make his poem a series of sentiments with but a slight admixture of images. But, after all, the most perfect descriptive poem must consist of an indistinguishable mixture, a perfect blending of imagery and senti ment. The eighteenth section of our author's work continues the subject. The practice of certain painters who have represented in one picture an entire story-as when Titian gives in one piece the entire story of the Prodigal Son; or as if Cole's four pictures of the Course of Life had been blended into one piece is condemned as an encroachment of the painter upon the territory of the poet, and serves to show that successions, not in time, but in space, are the proper sphere of the painter. Lessing argues an equal absurdity in those poetical descriptions which give scenes without motion from object to object. And yet there is a certain liberty allowed, both to the painter and the poet. The painter may unite two distinct moments in the posture of a figure. The artist may have the sense and the courage to force a rule of art, in order to attain a greater perfection of expression. The poet may dwell momentarily upon an object, suspending, for a certain time, the entire movement of his piece. The painter may sometimes represent a falling body with effect, as has been done by Hogarth; but these are accidental to the main design, and rather heighten than impair the harmony of the whole. Thus, the figures on the right and left of a picture, may seem to be in rapid action, while the more im A forest scene may indicate the movement of a tempest so as to produce a perfect illusion, without violating the unity and fixed lights and shadows of the whole. There is a broad margin allowed in all arts for an apparent departure from their peculiar principles. One of the most brilliant chapters in this work is the critique on the two descriptions of a shield-the shield of Achilles, by Homer, and the shield of Æneas, by Virgil. "Homer," says Lessing, "has composed upwards of a hundred magnificent verses in describing every circumstance connected with the shield of Achilles -its form, the material of which it was composed, and the figures with which its immense surface was covered, so minutely, and so exactly, that modern sculptors have found no difficulty in executing imiThis wonderful example of poetic painting is exetations of it, corresponding in every particular. cuted by Homer without the least departure from the principle adhered to by him throughout his work. The shield is epically described that is to say, created out of the rude iron and brass, by the and successively into view; the orb rises from an hands of the poet. Its figures spring gradually edge to its full splendor. Homer brings before our eyes not so much the shield itself, however, as the divine artist who is employed in making it. We cannot forbear noticing, at this opportunity, that of mechanical and agricultural labor are the most all descriptions in the ancient poets, those of interesting and exquisitely wrought. The idea of indignity or disgrace did not attach itself, in the sublime age of the epos, to mechanical labor. The stigma seems to be feudal, and is certainly the disgrace of our time. Thank God, we are ap proaching a new age, when labor shall no longer be a disgrace, but shall be dignified, as in heroic ages, by sages and poets, with the highest honors and men are free, when they have ceased to ‘love of humanity; and in the day when toil is honored a lord,' perhaps we shall have other heroes and poets, it may be, even greater than those of antiquity-but not while we are cursed with a servile literature, and a more servile art. with his hammer and pincers, and when he has "We see the divine artist approach the anvil finished forging the plate out of the rough ore, we perceive the figures destined for their embellishment, rising one after another from the surface beneath the judicious strokes of his hammer. We never once lose sight of the workman, until his labor is completed, and then the amazement with which we regard his work is mingled with the confident faith of eye-witnesses to its execution." Is not the above the finest piece of criticism that ever escaped a modern pen-the richest in suggestion, the most refined and discriminating, and with the greatest possible breadth of appreciation? Certainly nothing in Longinus approaches it, in com prehensiveness; and to have surpassed Longinus is to have surpassed all critics, not even excepting the favorite Goethe, whose subtleties, entitled criticisms, show, indeed, wonderful observation, but fall short in comprehensiveness, in the place of which they have often only mysteriousness. In the criticism of Lessing, the artist finds laid open for him, and clearly expressed, the rules by which he must work, if ever he succeed; rules derived not from speculation, but from a truly Baconian analysis (with an æsthetic guidance) of the greatest works that have been produced. Virgil's description of the shield of Æneas is treated by Lessing with great severity, and apparently with great justice. Moral simplicity of intention is wanting in the work. It is made a vehicle of flattery. Virgil introduces us to a view of the god Vulcan busied with the Cyclops, and produces a few celebrated lines. He then leads us off into a different scene; Venus and Æneas appear together in conversation; the shield is leaning against the trunk of an oak-it might have been any other tree, or a rock. The hero Eneas has already inspected, and admired, and handled the arms in a very common-place manner, which only excites the restless desire of the reader to get him out of the way, and handle them for one's self. And then follows what Lessing pronounces to be a tame and tedious description, made by the poet, of the figures wrought upon the shield, while Venus and Æneas stand by, either whispering in a side scene, or with signs of great impatience, we may suppose, for the poet to have done with his tedious ciceronism and cease from making them ridiculous. "Homer," says Lessing, "makes the god elaborate the decorations of the shield because he, the divine artist, with that high moral simplicity which characterizes true art, desires to produce a piece of workmanship worthy of his skill. Virgil, on the contrary, would lead us to imagine that the shield was executed for the sake of the ornaments." A degradation of the armor itself, of the poet, and of the divine artist, Hephistos. The twentieth section of the Laocoon, following out the principle already laid down by our author, prohibits the description of personal beauty by the poet, except in the most general terms. Homer tells us that Nireus was beautiful-that Achilles was still more so, and that the beauty of Helen was divine. "Nowhere do we find him entering into a circumstantial delineation of these examples of beauty; yet the beauty of Helen was the very pivot on which turns the entire fabric of the poem. How luxuriantly would one of our modern poets have dwelt on its details." These elaborate encroachments upon the province of the painter create confusion, and confusion only, in the imagination. The painter or the statuary can alone give us the picture or the statue of a Helen. After quoting an example from the Italians of this kind of description, Lessing draws a distinction between admiration for an artist and admiration for his work. We may admire the artist for the knowledge he displays, and the beautiful materials he brings together; we may condemn the work from its failure to produce a powerful and simple effect upon the imagination. Beauty should be described in poetry by its effects alone, by the grace of its actions. and by the admiration and the ardor which it excites. The only remaining topic of general interest touched upon in the Laocoon, is the use of deformity as a subject in art. It is argued that deformity is not a fit subject for the painter or the statuary, but is very proper for the uses of poetry; to this, however, there must be certain liberties permitted, since deformity may be used to set off beauty, even in painting; and we know that in the department of humorous painting, deformity is employed with great effect. The examination of this part of the Laocoon requires a separate treatment; and with every acknowledgment of his great genius, we here take our leave of the author with a protest and reservation against these conclusions of his twenty-fourth and twentyfifth chapters. J. D. W. AMERICAN DIPLOMACY WITH THE BARBARY POWERS. THEIR PIRACIES AND AGGRESSIONS. SINCE the conquest of Algiers by the French, the Barbary Powers have become wholly insignificant among the nations of the earth. They are virtually blotted from the roll of nations, and are hardly known except through history. A half century ago they held an important position, and if they did not command the respect of all Europe, they certainly made claims and enforced them as no other civilized or half-civilized nation would have dared to do. In their diplomatic relations they were peculiar setting at defiance the law of nations recognized by the civilized world, and adopting as their rule of action the piratical code. They were generally known by the name of Corsair States, a name which they well earned by their piracies, cruelty and treachery. civilization have made imperative, and which may be regarded as comparatively humane. Both conducted like savages, and both dishonored the religion they professed. No cruelties were too severe to inflict on the prisoners of either party. Christians were reduced to the most abject and cruel slavery, while on the other hand Mohammedans were compelled to suffer the severest tortures, and even death. But in this merciless warfare the Barbary States always had the advantage. They were well fitted for a predatory warfare. They found ample protection both in their mode of life and the natural position of their country. War was the means by which they lived, and though they were repulsed and their towns destroyed, yet they were never conquered. As soon as their enemies disappeared, they came forth from their hiding places, and were ready to plunder anew, and reduce their enemies to captivity. It is not our purpose to give a particular description of these States. At the beginning of the present century, the population consisted of several distinct races of By this warfare a system of Christian men, believers in the Mohammedan reli- | slavery had grown up in the Barbary States, gion, and acknowledging a partial connec- which to us seems almost incredible. tion with the Turkish empire, though acting Europeans were slaves to Africans, and in a good degree independent of that gov- drank to the dregs the bitter cup which ernment. They had been Mohammedan such bondage imposed. What number of for more than ten centuries, and for a Christian slaves there were at any one time long period were the terror of all Europe. in those States we have now no information. They pushed their conquests into Spain, and In the beginning of the sixteenth century remained the possessors and masters of a there were 30,000 employed in building the portion of that country for several hundred mole which connects Algiers with an island years, contending with the Christian, and in its harbor; and at the destruction of Tunis attempting to supplant his religion. It was in 1635, ten thousand were liberated by the not till the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella army of Charles V. They were engaged in that the Moors were expelled from Spain the construction of all the public works, and for ever, and that Europe began to feel that performed the most severe as well as servile Mohammedan power had extended to its tasks. So grievous had it become that all utmost limits. Europe suffered. The Pope offered pardon to all who should undertake a deliverance to the captives, and immediate entrance into paradise to all who fell in so laudable an undertaking. The army of Charles V. consisted of 30,000 selected troops from Germany, Italy, and Spain, and in the destruction of Tunis it apparently gained a most It is not at all surprising that the constant warfare between the Christians and Mohammedans had created a feeling of hostility between them, which neither a sense of justice or humanity could control. At first it is probable that both parties were alike regardless of those rules of war which modern decided victory. It however proved but temporary, and like a hundred other victories over them, it proved to be but a mere chastisement, and for a short time only checked their insolence and rapacity. ers. tribute to these robbers. Never would these From that time to 1815 these people For During our colonial history our relations with these powers were formed by Great Britain, and our commerce in the Mediterranean, which at the time of the Revolution was considerable, was protected by the tribute which that government paid. During the Revolution we had no commerce in that quarter, and of course there was no opportunity for aggression. No sooner was peace restored than our commerce revived, and our ships, bearing the new flag of stars and stripes, made their appearance in that sea. They went there too without any convoy or The French next had their turn, and in means of defence, and from a country that at 1682 sent a fleet under Admiral Duquesne the close of the war of Independence had not against Algiers. On this occasion it is said a single armed ship to protect its infant but that bombs were first used on ships of war. growing commerce. The temptation was too So destructive did they prove that the Dey great for Algerine honesty, and the country soon yielded, and restored the captives, and too remote and too much exhausted to inmade ample indemnity. The Dey, after-spire fear. The flag had not yet borne thunwards learning the great expense of the ex-ders to the gates of the Dey's palace, nor had pedition, sent word to Louis XIV. that for one half of the sum he would have burned the whole city of Algiers. All these expeditions against those States, of which twenty others might be mentioned, originated in the same way, and had nearly the same termination. The recovery of property and the deliverance of captives was the great object of them all; and these being accomplished, a temporary peace would follow on the agreement of the injured party to pay an annual tribute. Un til our Government finally resolved to resist this badge of servitude, it had always been considered a necessary part of every treaty with them, and it seemed to be the only way which could then be adopted to protect the subjects of the sovereigns of Europe from slavery and robbery. At least the European nations thought so, and universally adopted it. Though every port of the Barbary States might have been blockaded, and the power of the Corsairs humbled, yet through jealousy of each other, or from the base desire of gaining some undue advantage, they preferred the humiliating choice of paying his people learned the lesson which subsequent sad experience taught them. Accordingly the Dey made a formal declaration of war against the United States in July, 1785, and immediately after two of our vessels, the schooner Maria, of Boston, and the ship Dauphin, of Philadelphia, were seized, and their crews, twenty-one in number, were carried as slaves to Algiers. The news of this outrage, as it well might, created great alarm in this country. The name of Algerine had become odious and synonymous with pirate. It was connected with every horrible tale of childhood, and was far more terrible in its associations than even the cruel tortures of the American savage. And what made it still more alarming was the fact that there were no means by which those citizens could be freed, or others protected, but by the slow process of negotiation-negotiation too with a people that acknowledged no law but such as their own selfishness created, and were bound by no obligation but self-interest. This attack upon our commerce was not wholly unexpected. The importance and |