Likewise of the second Pæon (v-uu) in the first foot followed by four trochees (- v) as:

"So greedily lōng for, | know their |

The emphasis too has a decided influence on the metre, and, contrary to the metres of the Greek and Roman classics, at least to all their more common sorts of verse, as the hexameter and hex and pentameter, Alchaic, Sapphic, &c. has an essential agency on the character of the feet and power of the verse. instance only of this I recollect in Theocritus:

τα μὴ καλὰ καλὰ πεφᾶνται,

One

unless Homer's "Aqɛs, "Aqɛs, may (as I believe) be deemed another-For I can not bring my ear to believe that Homer would have perpetrated such a cacophony as "2985, "Agɛ5.

"In fear | my chaasteetee | may be | sus

In short, musical notes are required to explain Massinger-metres in addition to prosody. When a speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of the succeeding Massinger counts but for one, because both are supposed to be spoken at the same moment. "And felt the sweetness of't."

"How her mouth runs over."

Ib. ib.

Emphasis itself is twofold, the rap and the drawl, or the emphasis by quality of sound, and that by quantity-the hammer, and the spatula-the latter over 2, 3, 4 syllables or even a whole line. It is in this that the actors and speakers are generally speaking defective, they can not equilibrate an emphasis, or spread it over a number of syllables, all emphasized, sometimes equally, sometimes unequally.

give it only the one over-running syllable, which is so common in the last foot.

LECTURE VIII.

DON QUIXOTE.

CERVANTES.

BORN at Madrid, 1547 ;-Shakspeare, 1564; both put off mortality on the same day, the 23d of April, 1616,-the one in the sixty-ninth, the other in the fifty-second, year of his life. The resemblance in their physiognomies is striking, but with a predominance of acuteness in Cervantes, and of reflection in Shakspeare, which is the specific difference between the Spanish and English characters of mind.

I. The nature and eminence of Symbolical writing;

II. Madness, and its different sorts (considered without pretension to medical science) ;—

To each of these, or at least to my own notions respecting them, I must devote a few words of explanation, in order to render the after-critique on Don Quixote, the master-work of Cervantes' and his country's genius, easily and throughout intelligible. This is not the least valuable, though it may most often be felt by us both as the heaviest and least entertaining portion of these critical disquisitions: for without it, I must have foregone one at least of the two appropriate objects of a Lecture, that of interesting you during its delivery, and of leaving behind in your minds the germs of after-thought, and the materials for future enjoyment. To have been assured by several of my intelligent auditors that they have reperused Hamlet or Othello with increased satisfaction in consequence of the new points of view in which I had placed those characters-is the highest compliment I could receive or desire; and should the address of this evening open out a new source of pleasure, or enlarge the former in your perusal of Don Quixote, it will compensate for the failure of any personal or temporary object.

I. The Symbolical can not, perhaps, be better defined in dis

tinction from the Allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative."Here comes a sail" (that is, a ship) is a symbolical expression. "Behold our lion!" when we speak of some gallant soldier, is allegorical. Of most importance to our present subject is this point, that the latter (the allegory) can not be other than spoken consciously; whereas in the former (the symbol) it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working unconsciously in the writer's mind during the construction of the symbol;— and it proves itself by being produced out of his own mind,—as the Don Quixote out of the perfectly sane mind of Cervantes : and not by outward observation, or historically. The advantage of symbolical writing over allegory is, that it presumes no disjunction of faculties, but simple predominance.

II. Madness may be divided as—

1. hypochondriasis; or, the man is out of his senses.

2. derangement of the understanding; or, the man is out of his wits.

3. loss of reason.

4. frenzy, or derangement of the sensations.

Cervantes's own preface to Don Quixote is a perfect model of the gentle, everywhere intelligible, irony in the best essays of the Tatler and the Spectator. Equally natural and easy, Cervantes is more spirited than Addison; whilst he blends with the terseness of Swift, an exquisite flow and music of style, and above all, contrasts with the latter by the sweet temper of a superior mind, which saw the follies of mankind, and was even at the moment suffering severely under hard mistreatment ;* and yet seems everywhere to have but one thought as the undersong"Brethren! with all your faults I love you still!"-or as a mother that chides the child she loves, with one hand holds up the rod, and with the other wipes off each tear as it drops!

Don Quixote was neither fettered to the earth by want, nor holden in its embraces by wealth;-of which, with the temperance natural to his country, as a Spaniard, he had both far too little, and somewhat too much, to be under any necessity of think

* Bien como quien se engendrò en una carcel, donde toda incomodidad tiene su assiento, y todo triste ruido hace su habitacion. Like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every inconvenience keeps its residence, and every dismal sound its habitation. Pref. Jarvis's Tr.-Ed.

ing about it. His age too, fifty, may be well supposed to prevent his mind from being tempted out of itself by any of the lower passions; while his habits, as a very early riser and a keen sportsman, were such as kept his spare body in serviceable subjection to his will, and yet by the play of hope that accompanies pursuit, not only permitted, but assisted, his fancy in shaping what it would. Nor must we omit his meagreness and entire featureliness, face and frame, which Cervantes gives us at once: “It is said that his surname was Quixada or Quesada,” &c.— even in this trifle showing an exquisite judgment ;—just once insinuating the association of lantern-jaws into the reader's mind, yet not retaining it obtrusively like the names in old farces and in the Pilgrim's Progress,-but taking for the regular appellative one which had the no meaning of a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armor, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, and recipiency of external impression.

He has no knowledge of the sciences or scientific arts which give to the meanest portions of matter an intellectual interest, and which enable the mind to decipher in the world of the senses the invisible agency—that alone, of which the world's phenomena are the effects and manifestations,—and thus, as in a mirror, to contemplate its own reflex, its life in the powers, its imagination in the symbolic forms, its moral instincts in the final causes, and its reason in the laws of material nature: but—estranged from all the motives to observation from self-interest-the persons that surround him too few and too familiar to enter into any connection with his thoughts, or to require any adaptation of his conduct to their particular characters or relations to himself-his judgment lies fallow, with nothing to excite, nothing to employ it. Yet, and here is the point, where genius even of the most perfect kind, allotted but to few in the course of many ages, does not preclude the necessity in part, and in part counterbalance the craving by sanity of judgment, without which genius either can not be, or can not at least manifest itself,—the dependency of our nature asks for some confirmation from without, though it be only from the shadows of other men's fictions.

Too uninformed, and with too narrow a sphere of power and opportunity to rise into the scientific artist, or to be himself a patron of art, and with too deep a principle, and too much innocence to become a mere projector, Don Quixote has recourse to

romances:

His curiosity and extravagant fondness herein arrived at that pitch, that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books of knight-errantry, and carried home all he could lay hands on of that kind !—C. 1.

The more remote these romances were from the language of common life, the more akin on that very account were they to the shapeless dreams and strivings of his own mind;—a mind, which possessed not the highest order of genius which lives in an atmosphere of power over mankind, but that minor kind which, in its restlessness, seeks for a vivid representative of its own wishes, and substitutes the movements of that objective puppet for an exercise of actual power in and by itself. The more wild and improbable these romances were, the more were they akin to his will, which had been in the habit of acting as an unlimited monarch over the creations of his fancy! Hence observe how the startling of the remaining common sense, like a glimmering before its death, in the notice of the impossible-improbable of Don Belianis, is dismissed by Don Quixote as impertinent—

He had some doubt as to the dreadful wounds which Don Belianis gave and received: for he imagined, that notwithstanding the most expert surgeons had cured him, his face and whole body must still be full of seams and scars. Nevertheless he commended in his author the concluding his book with a promise of that unfinishable adventure!-C. 1.

Hence also his first intention to turn author; but who, with such a restless struggle within him, would content himself with writing in a remote village among apathists and ignorants? During his colloquies with the village-priest and the barber-surgeon, in which the fervor of critical controversy feeds the passion and gives reality to its object-what more natural than that the mental striving should become an eddy ?-madness may perhaps be defined as the circling in a stream which should be progressive and adaptive; Don Quixote grows at length to be a man out of his wits; his understanding is deranged; and hence without the least deviation from the truth of nature, without losing *No estaba muy bien con.-Ed. Pero con todo.-Ed.