Portuguese, Swedish and Danish literature, will, I think, receive their true explanation by reference to the same principles by which the literary development of other countries has been regulated, and all, I think, establish the position that a classic and correct literature is produced by the effect of a refined aristocracy upon enterprising and ambitious commoners.

The longer the constitutional stage of a nation's life is prolonged, the slower is the transition from the preceding to the future stages; and the consequences of the continued strife between the political elements make themselves manifest in literature. In the reign of Queen Anne our literature was purely aristocratical, and literary men (saving always those of Grub Street) had all the characteristics of members of a profession. Although they lived by their writings, it was a desire for fame and social distinction that led them to adopt that means of procuring a livelihood. Some of our authors still write for fame, and still address an audience scrupulously correct in taste and aristocratical in feeling others abandon the pain of incessant correction, and a refined self-education, for the unfamed affluence of speedy, slipshod voluminous writing, whose authors seldom publish a name, and still less frequently earn one; and our literature, like all the rest of our civilisation, shows the conciliation of the two distinct types, for we have both a profession and a trade of literaThe extremes are easy enough to be distinguished; but the boundary line it is difficult to draw.

ture.

There is no greater fallacy now current than that implied in the complaints respecting the position of literary men in English society. Those who belong to the profession are as much courted and respected among the higher circles as they ever were. Macaulay, Mill, Hallam, Grote, Tennyson, Trench, who may be supposed to write from a love of literature, and because they have something to say, attest this: but the tradesmen of literature are treated as other tradesmen, not because there is

anything disgraceful in being a tradesman, but because his morale and tone of mind is frequently not that of a gentleman; and so periodical critics and newspaper rhetoricians are treated with suspicion. If found gentlemen, they are encouraged and admitted to good society; but there is a doubt which must first be dispelled. It is only those who have not succeeded in dispelling the doubt with regard to themselves that complain of the ill-treatment of men of letters by modern society.

In an age of much writing and reading there is less show of distinguished talent, and more dispersion of its fruits among the rich growth of weeds; but take it all in all, there is sometimes more fruit. If there is no false standard of taste to lead men away, their writings, however hurried and diffuse, will contain many thoughts of truth and grandeur, many passages of faultless splendour. At this day we have no one author whom we could rank in the same hall of the temple of fame with Bacon or Newton, with Swift or Milton; but let us take all the wit, the ingenuity, the wisdom, the eloquence of the age, and do as the ancients did with their old legislators, attribute all of it to two or three imaginary persons, or two or three of the most eminent of the age, and then England in its nineteenth century would have as proud representatives at the court of posterity as the England of any previous century.

But it should ever be remembered that a fine and original literature is the effect and not the cause of the moral grandeur of the nation. As the greatest inventors and authors are not generally those who are most fond of books, so the nation most overrun with books, and where there is most reading, is not necessarily the nation that can create or continue a literature worthy of immortal fame. Reading was a much more common pursuit in Florence after its enslavement than in its earlier days of greatness. So now in Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, and in the United States of America, all of them barren

in great offspring, there is much more reading than in ages and in countries which have produced illustrious works. For reading is one of the common pastimes of idle plutocracies and otiose peasants; reading often without thought, and without any inducement urging them to add any but the trumpiest viands to the banquet of which they partake. They read because they live in towns or snug hamlets with nothing else to do; with no country sports, no estates to manage (for if they have estates they leave them to their bailiffs), no politics to engage them, for politics they leave to the functionary of government. They read because the occupation of part of their time provides them with enough to live on, and their spare hours are better employed in reading than in riotous or vicious amusements. Such reading leads to little fruit; and though they make acquaintance with the master minds of other ages, and honour them often with enthusiasm, they fail to catch the spark. It is not an idle love of literature that makes a great author; there must be some more active instigation urging him on. For great works are produced only in ages of great individual toil, and on the eve of great social movements. Now, in aristocratic ages, mere love of money may, in some few instances, be the instigator; but as wealth can be acquired in greater degree, and with more ease, in almost any other occupation, wealth does not deserve to be called the main object to men of real literary genius. Their great inducement, beyond the pleasure of intellectual creation, is the love of being praised by those whose esteem they value, or whose society and acquaintance they covet.

"Honos alit artes omnesque incenduntur ad studia gloriâ."

When there are no longer such persons in a state to afford this incentive, or when their society, and even an equality with them, may be attained by quicker and less laborious means, men may continue to write, but it will be for money only; and they will not labour so hard and so

fastidiously as long to maintain any high standard of excellence: the spirit of exact literary taste has fled,

"And hearts that once beat high for praise,

Now feel that pulse no more."

After that writing becomes a trade. Now, I anticipate that this explanation of literary inducement to excellence may be accused of reducing the inspiration of literary men to what is called at college tuft-hunting. But, remember, who are those that in the age when literature first bursts forth are the wearers of tufts. They are the only persons who then possess a refined and elegant taste. All below them are coarse and rude, no fit auditors for literature. “I had rather," says Milton, whom no one will accuse of tuft-hunting, "since the life of men is likened to a scene, that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices." The noblesse represent great mansions where the author would be saved from starvation; they represent rich subscribers who would enable him to live with the happy delusion of earning his bread; they represent graceful and admiring hosts, within whose orbits alone sparkle the wit and elegant learning of the age, and who themselves not seldom cultivate the art of literature with success, and often in their proud rivalries they call in aid the boldness and genius of the authors attached to their interest. It was a noble ambition of the feudal potentates laying aside their armed retainers and their princely bands of pursuivants, rather to glory in the number and the genius of the thoughtful men whom their munificence provided with literary leisure, their applause stimulated to great exertions, their emulation encouraged and ennobled.

At the dawn of national existence the rays of the rising sun reach only the lofty warrior chieftains. Looking

*Colasterion, Prose Works, i. 339.

back upon those ages we can see none but these exalted personages; - below them nothing but an obscure, ignoble crowd-and as the day advances and the meridian is approached, the field illumined is indeed wider, but these warriors and their descendants still stand forth in the most solemn and imposing lights as commanding as ever, and fascinate the eyes of the beholder till he can look only upon them, and the men who circle round them, to partake and to reflect the sheen of intellectual as well as social glory.

We are apt, when we open the books of the 16th and 17th centuries, now the classics of England, to scoff at the noble name which is prefixed, to pity the servility that it pleases us to discover in the glowing dedication, and to think it a little compliment to be called My Best Patron by an immortal author. But however meanly we may sometimes think of the author's independence, let us beware of despising the patron. Had not Thomas, Earl of Pembroke and Lord Shaftesbury rescued Locke, where had been the Essay on the Human Understanding? Had not the Duke of Buckingham lodged Cowley in his farm at Chertsey, would there not have been one star less in our horizon? How much does Hobbes owe to Cavendish, Bacon to Essex, Butler to the Earl of Dorset, Milton to the Earl of Bridgewater, Congreve to Montagu, Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Leicester and Lord Grey, Selden to the Earl and Countess of Kent, Ben Jonson to the Earl of Newcastle, Gay to the Duke and Duchess of Queensborough? Let these and many questions like them, not merely in English but in French and Italian history, be answered before the patrons are condemned.

For my own part, I never wander through the painted galleries of their ancient mansions, - replete with the tattered trophies of war, the magnificent records of great achievements in peace, the long line of ancestral effigies, the armour-hung corridors, their memorial chambers, their historic boudoirs,-without thinking that the greatest