poet exercised his art. The theologian and the poet, the jurist and the dramatist, the scholar and the bold idiomatic writer of his own tongue, the metaphysician and the romance writer, the lexicographer and the ballad-maker; Luther and Ariosto, Bartolus and the free writers of the Italian comedy, Erasmus and Hans Sachs, Ficinus the Platonist, and the author of Amadis de Gaul, Budæus and the minstrels of the Spanish Cancionero, all must successively and in rapid transition pass in review; each receive his duly-measured and carefully-balanced meed of praise or blame; and take his rank according to his relative merits as to his own age, and the general advancement of letters.

Mr. Hallam speaks with diffidence not unbecoming the most learned and accomplished man, of his own qualifications as a literary historian of Europe. For our own part, judging solely from the substantial and recognised excellence of his former writings, we could not have selected a name in modern English literature, which we should more cordially rejoice to see prefixed to the announcement of such a work. For diligence in research and scrupulous accuracy, a wide range of knowledge and masculine independence of judgment, that name is a sufficient guarantee. Mr. Hallam is among the few modern authors who have not lost in depth what they have gained in extent of surface. He is of the old race-we would not willingly say, one of the last representatives of our scholarlike writers; yet he has manifestly advanced with the rapid stream of modern literature, at least as far as most of his cotemporaries. He appears from the present volume to have extended his acquaintance with modern languages. We do not remember any reference in his former books to German authorities; but we now find him acknowledging great obligations to the laborious writers of that country-without whose assistance, indeed, a work of this nature would be very incomplete. Meiners, Heeren, Bouterwek, Heinsius, the Schlegels, contribute with Andrès, Tiraboschi, with Bayle and Niceron, Warton, and the various biographical dictionaries, to the fulness and particularity of this valuable book. But while Mr. Hallam's readers have a perfect right to rely on these credentials of extensive and well-arranged information, and sound judgment as to those grave questions which are allied to historical fact, and to the progress of general knowledge-in one respect this volume may surpass their expectations. Those who know Mr. Hallam only by his former works, in which questions of purely literary taste occurred but rarely, will be no less delighted perhaps than surprised, to find this laborious diligence allied with the most ardent admiration of the original, the imaginative, and the harmonious, in the poetry of all countries: they will find themselves

passing

passing from the inevitable dryness of a paragraph relating to the progress of grammatical studies, to a burst of eloquence, called forth by the magic of some great bard of Italy or of England. The characteristic of Mr. Hallam's criticism is the union of a vigorous common sense, with a just appreciation of the elevated, the noble, and the original, in poetry. He is superior to the vanity of calling forth some undistinguished writer from the crowd, in order to display his own ingenuity in vindicating his title to a higher place; or his own originality, by contemptuously reversing the general judgment of mankind. He is just and generous to all, but not so prodigal as to leave little distinction between the different gradations of merit. He advances no new canons. He is entangled in no speculative theory, such as, in many works of modern criticism, at first dazzles us by an appeal to our depth of thought; and leaves us dissatisfied at last in finding that we have been mystified rather than instructed. Mr. Hallam is philosophical without philosophising—his is the plain and perspicuous philosophy of a strong mind, which never plunges beyond its depth; and is content with clearly stating his impressions without subtly analyzing or refining upon them to excess. There is, besides, a kind of manly amenity throughout the volume, as of a mind dealing with subjects calmer and less allied to exciting passions than Mr. Hallam's former works, where the fray of political opinion struck out at times, expressions not without rigour, and judgments not free from severity. In the present volume we have been struck with the union of independence and candour of respect for common opinions, with the fair assertion of the freedom of his own-which on certain rather delicate subjects, the characters, for instance, of some of the reformers, it is not easy to maintain. The general tone is decisive without being dictatorial; plain, but not peremptory. He who differs from others with such perfect command of temper, has a right to more than patient hearing, to something of deferential respect to his matured and recorded judgments.

It is not easy in a brief and limited article to give a just notice of a work, the great merit of which is, and ought to be, the close condensation of a vast and various mass of knowledge in a few pages. Ours must be the review of that which itself is a powerful, compressed, and comprehensive reviewal. If we should select a few of the subjects on which the author has treated, for more detailed examination, we should either dilute his pregnant pages, or take, as it were, an unfair advantage, by transgressing those bounds which his self-denial has rigidly prescribed to himself. On some minor points we may differ, but, in general, we should find it difficult to state the grounds of our difference without entering

entering upon a long and perhaps uninteresting dissertation. Where we attempt an outline, then, it must be very slightly drawn; the selection of subjects, upon which we offer our observations, where there is so much to interest and to instruct, must at least have the appearance of chance or caprice.

Mr. Hallam commences with an introductory chapter, containing the first dawn of letters in Europe, after the extinction of classical Latinity in Boethius-the universal domination of the scholastic philosophy-the formation of the modern languages-the revival of classical learning, chiefly under the influence of Petrarch. Of the early part of this period it may be generally said that Latin was the language of prose, the vernacular tongues that of poetry; during the fourteenth century, popular fiction and some graver branches of knowledge began to take the form of prose. But the Latin had sunk to the lowest state of barbarism. The exclusive possession of a very narrow caste, confined to subjects altogether alien to the modes of thinking and forms of expression prevalent in the purer ages of Latinity, uncorrected by the study of better models in the writings of antiquity, it had become an hybrid and ungrammatical dialect, in which the initiate in the several sciences, scholastic divinity, law, and medicine, carried on their general in tercourse, and trained their respective scholars. But since the doom of Latin, as a common language, was sealed; as it had ceased to be the vernacular dialect of men, it was well, perhaps, that it had sunk to so low a state, and retired within the confined domain of a very limited oligarchy. The premature revival and general prevalence of classical studies just at this period, might have checked the free development of the modern languages, and withdrawn some of their earlier cultivators within its less useful and fertile province. Petrarch, if Latin had continued more intelligible to the popular ear, might have sung of Laura in the artificial and lifeless language of his Africa. But poetry, the primary agent in civilization, had resumed its office. What Homer and her other minstrels had been to Greece, the disseminators and conservators of a common language, intelligible alike to Dorian, Æolian, or Ionian, a general standard which, notwithstanding its infinite diversity of dialects, maintained Greek as one language; such, in a great degree, were some of the earlier poets in the modern languages of Europe. The spirit of song brooded over the chaos of various dialects and idioms which prevailed, and reduced them, may we venture the fanciful expression, to an Heptatone harmony-the seven-stringed lyre of European poetry began to breathe its softening notes to the popular ear. By the year 1400 we find a national literature subsisting in seven European languages, three spoken in the Spanish peninsula, the French, the

D 2

Italian,

Italian, the German, and the English. Our own tongue, though it had latterly acquired much copiousness in the hands of Chaucer and Wickliffe, both of whom lavishly supplied it with words of French and Latin derivation, was but just growing into a literary existence. The German, as well as that of Valencia, seemed to decline. At the precise period, indeed, to which this passage from Mr. Hallam refers, the first splendid burst of poetry—the Epic or Homeric age, as it were-had passed away, and was not immediately replaced by a new race of bards who could win the general ear, and prolong the empire of poetry over the general mind. It had discharged its primary function in all the various languages, which if it had not created, it had at least consolidated, regulated, harmonized; to which it had habituated the popular ear, and established something like a standard of grammatical form and expression, to be perfected at length into a national lan guage.

Spain already possessed, in that which was afterwards called Castilian, her great poem of the Cid,* and some, though perhaps not many, of the fine old romantic ballads which form her Cancionero. Portugal had her own poets. Mr. Hallam quotes a curious volume (printed by Lord Stuart of Rothsay) of Portuguese songs, as early as the twelfth century. The third Spanish language of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, was called the Valencian, but in fact was the Provençal of the south of France, perhaps the eldest barbarian daughter of the Latin, the language of the Troubadours and their gay science. This language had gradually retreated from before the French, into the kindred provinces of northern Spain, and there maintained its independence for several centuries. The Valencian, therefore, might claim the Provençal poets as its parents; their lays of love, and their religious satires, were the groundwork and chief part of its literature. The chivalrous romances of the Trouveurs, and the poems of Wace, had given a promise of freedom, invention, and occasional picturesqueness, by no means fulfilled by the later poetry of France; and France, even then, by the fatal influence of the long-drawn allegory of the Roman de la Rose (translated by our Chaucer, and imitated in its form in other countries), threw a languor, something of a chilling torpor, over the spirit of national song among her neighbours. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, the best poetry of France, as in later periods, was in her prose. In the vivid and picturesque narrative, the chivalrous tone, the truth of delineation, we may add, perhaps, the invention of old Froissart, we have more of the stirring life, the character, *We need hardly remind our readers of Mr. Frere's admirable versions from this poem, printed in the appendix to Mr. Southey's Chronicle of the Cid.'

the

the nationality, almost the form of the true Epic, than has appeared either before or since in the poetry of France. Germany could boast of her Heldenbuch, and her Nibelungen-lied; poems manifestly of more ancient date than chivalry, of which their more rude and simple, if we may so speak, heroic manners have no trace. She had also her long array of Minne-singers, her bards of hall and bower, who in evil hour were superseded by her burgher poets, the Meister-singers of the guilds or fraternities.

'Meantime a new race of poets, chiefly burghers of towns, sprung up about the reign of Rodolph of Hapsburgh, before the lays of the Minne-singers had yet ceased to resound. These prudent, though not inspired, votaries of the muse, chose the didactic and moral style as more salutary than the love songs, and more reasonable than the romances. They became known in the fourteenth century by the name of Meistersingers, but are traced to the institutions of the twelfth century, called Singing-schools, for the promotion of popular music, the favourite recreation of Germany. What they may have done for music I am unable to say it was in an evil hour for the art of poetry that they extended their jurisdiction over her. They regulated verse by the most pedantic and minute laws, such as a society with no idea of excellence but conformity to rule would be sure to adopt; though nobler institutions have often done the same, the Master-burghers were but prototypes of the Italian academicians. The poetry was always moral and serious, but flat. These Meister-singers are said to have originated at Mentz, from which they spread to Augsburg, Strasburg, and other cities, and in none were more renowned than Nuremberg. Charles IV., in 1378, incorporated them by the name of Meister-genoss-shaft, with armorial bearings and peculiar privileges. They became, however, more conspicuous in the sixteenth century; scarce any names of Meistersingers before that age are recorded; nor does it seem that much of their earlier poetry is extant.'-vol. i. pp. 52, 53.

Italy ripened more slowly; but, when once mature, she broke forth with all the rapid luxuriance and vigour of southern vegetation, she bore at once her earliest flower and her richest fruit. Dante and Petrarch were almost the creators, as well as the unrivalled models, each in his style, of real Italian poetry. It might seem that in Italy Latin maintained a more vigorous struggle for its ascendancy; or that the various dialects required a master hand, not so much in this case to form them into one national tongue, as to assert the predominance of the Tuscan, from henceforth to be the accredited literary language of Italy. The first efforts indeed of Italian poetry were provincial, chiefly Sicilian, and but for the commanding influence of Dante and Petrarch, the Peninsula might have had as many separate literatures as provinces. Her modern Goldonis and Melis, instead of being what Ramsay and Burns are to English poetry, might have been the successors and heirs of a distinct race of writers.

After Italy, England could boast in Chaucer the greatest poet

of