persons of Scott, and Jeffrey, and Chalmers, and Campbell, and Wilson, and Carlyle. Considering the amount of influence exerted by such men upon the whole spirit and substance of British literature, considering how disproportionate a share of the whole literary produce of Great Britain in the nineteenth century has come either from them or from other Scotchmen, and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish origin, it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth of Scottish literature is as notable a historical phenomenon as the rise and growth of the Scottish philosophy. And considering, moreover, how lately Scotland has entered on this literary field, how little time she has had to display her powers, how recently she was in this respect savage, and how much of her savage vitality yet remains to be articulated in civilized books, may we not hope that her literary avatar is but beginning, and has a goodly course yet to run? From the Solway to Caithness we hear a loud Amen!

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THEORIES OF POETRY.*

THERE have been hundreds of disquisitions on poetry in all ages-long and short, good, bad, and indifferent; and now-adays, we cannot open a magazine or a review without finding something new said about our friend" The Poet," as distinguished from our other friend "The Prophet," and the like. But cant cannot be helped; and, if we are to abandon good phrases because they have been used a great many times, there is an end to all reviewing. Much, too, as has been spoken about poetry and poets, we doubt if the world, in its lucubrations on this subject, has got far beyond the antithesis suggested by what Aristotle said about it two thousand years ago, on the one hand, and what Bacon advanced two hundred and fifty years ago, on the other. At least, acquainted as we are with a good deal that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Goethe, and Leigh Hunt, and now Mr. Dallas, have written about poetry by way of more subtle and insinuating investigation, we still feel that the best notion of the thing, for any manageable purpose, is to be beaten out of the rough-hewn definitions of it, from opposite sides, supplied by Aristotle and Bacon. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes as follows:

66 Epic poetry and the poetry of tragedy, as well as comedy and dithyrambic poetry, and most flute and lyre music, all are, in their nature, viewed generally, imitations (uphoeus); differing from each other, however, in three thingseither in that they imitate by different means, or in that they imitate different things, or in that they imitate differently and not in the same manner. For, as some artists, either from technical training or from mere habit, imitate various objects by colours and forms, and other artists by vocal sound; so, of the arts mentioned above, all effect their imitation by rhythm, and words and melody, employed either severally or in combination. For example, in flute and lyre music, and in any other kind of music having similar effect, such as pipe music, melody and rhythm are alone used. In the dance, again, the imitation is accomplished by rhythm by itself, without melody; there being dancers who, by means of rhythmical gesticulations, imitate even manners, passions, and acts. Lastly, epic poetry produces its imitations either by mere articulate words, or by metre superadded. .

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* NORTH BRITISH REVIEW; August, 1853.-Poetics: an Essay on Poetry. By E. S. DALLAS. London, 1852.

Since, in the second place, those who imitate copy living characters, it behoves imitations either to be of serious and lofty, or of mean and trivial objects. The imitation must, in fact, either be of characters and actions better than they are found among ourselves, or worse, or much the same; just as, among painters, Polygnotus represented people better-looking than they were, Pauson worse-looking, and Dionysius exactly as they were. Now, it is evident that each of the arts above mentioned will have these differences, the difference arising from their imitating different things. In the dance, and in flute and lyre music, these diversities are visible; as also in word-imitations and simple metre. Homer, for example, really made men better than they are; Cleophon made them such as they are; whereas Hegemon, the first writer of parodies, and Nicochares, made them worse. So also in dithyrambics and lyrics, one might, with Timotheus and Philoxenus, imitate even Persians and Cyclopses. By this very difference, too, is tragedy distinguished from comedy. The one even now strives in its imitations to exhibit men better than they are, the other worse.... Still the third difference remains, namely, as to the manner or form of the imitation. For even though the means of imitation, and the things imitated, should be the same, there might be this difference, that the imitation might be made either in the form of a narration, (and that either through an alien narrator, as Homer does, or in one's own person without changing,) or by representing the imitators as all active and taking part. So that, though in one respect Homer and Sophocles would go together as imitators, as both having earnest subjects, in another Sophocles and Aristophanes would go together, as both imitating dramatically. . . . . . Two causes, both of them natural, seem to have operated together to originate the poetic art. The first is, that the tendency to imitate is innate in men from childhood, (the difference between man and other animals being that he is the most imitative of all, acquiring even his first lessons in knowledge through imitation,) and that all take pleasure in imitation. Moreover, in the second place, just as the tendency to imitate is natural to us, so also is the love of melody and of rhythm; and metre is evidently a variety of rhythm. Those, therefore, who from the first were most strongly inclined to these things by nature, proceeding by little and little, originated poetry out of their impromptu fancies. Poetry, thus originated, was broken into departments corresponding to the peculiar characters of its producers; the more serious imitating only beautiful actions and their issues, while the more thoughtless natures imitated mean incidents, inventing lampoons, as others had invented hymns and eulogies. Before Homer we have no poem of any kind to be mentioned; though, doubtless, many existed."

Such, as indicated in those sentences of the treatise which seem to be of most essential import, is the general doctrine of Aristotle as to the nature of Poetry. With this contrast Bacon's theory, as stated, cursorily but profoundly, in the following sentences from the Advancement of Learning :

"The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of man's understanding, which is the seat of learning-History to his Memory; Poesy to his Imagination; and Philosophy to his Reason. Poesy is a part of learning, in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which Nature hath severed, and sever that which Nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things. Pictoribus atque Poetis, &c. It (Poetry) is taken in two senses-in respect of words, or matter. In the first sense, it is but a character of style, and belongeth to the arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present; in the latter, it is, as hath been said, one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which

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may be styled as well in prose as in verse. The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in the points wherein the nature of things doth deny it—the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, Poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical; because true history propoundeth the successes and the issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore Poesy feigneth them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed Providence; because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore Poesy endueth them with more rareness, so as it appeareth that Poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and delectation. And, therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind, whereas Reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. In this third part of learning, which is Poesy, I can report no deficience. For, being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind."

Now, though it would be possible, we doubt not, so to stretch and comment upon Aristotle's theory of poetry as to make it correspond with this of Bacon's, yet, primâ facie, the two theories are different, and even antithetical. If both are true, it is because the theorists tilt at opposite sides of the shield. Aristotle makes the essence of poetry to consist in its being imitative and truthful; Bacon, in its being creative and fantastical. According to Aristotle, there is a natural tendency in men to the imitation of what they see in nature; the various arts are nothing more than imitations, so to speak, with different kinds of imitating substance; and poetry is that art which imitates in articulate language, or, at most, in language elevated and rendered more rich and exquisite by the addition of metre. According to Bacon, on the other hand, there is a natural tendency and a natural prerogative in the mind of man, to condition the universe anew for its own intellectual satisfaction; to brood, as it were, over the sea of actual existences, carrying on the work of creation with these existences for the material, and its own phantasies and longings for the informing spirit; to be ever on the wing among nature's sounds and appearances, not merely for the purpose of observing and co-ordinating them, but also that it may delight itself with new ideal combinations, severing what nature has joined, and joining what nature has put asunder. Poetry, in accordance with this view, might perhaps be

defined as the art of producing, by means of articulate lan✓guage, metrical or unmetrical, a fictitious concrete; this being either like to something existing in nature, or, if unlike anything there existing, justifying that unlikeness by the charm of its own impressiveness.

Amid all the discussions of all the critics as to the nature of

poetry, this antagonism, if such it is, between the Aristotelian and the Baconian theories, will be found eternally reproducing itself. When Wordsworth defined poetry to be "emotion recollected in tranquillity," and declared it to be the business of the poet to represent out of real life, and as nearly as possible in the language of real life, scenes and events of an affecting or exciting character, he reverted, and with good effect, to the imitation-theory of Aristotle. All Coleridge's disquisitions, on the other hand, even when his friend Wordsworth is the theme and exemplar, are subtle developments of the imagination-theory of Bacon. His famous remark that the true antithesis is not Poetry and Prose, but Poetry and Science, is but another form of Bacon's remark, that whereas it is the part of Reason "to buckle and bow the mind to the nature of things," it is the part of Imagination, as the poetical faculty, "to raise the mind by submitting the shows of things to its desires." And so with the definitions, more or less formal, of other writers. Thus Leigh Hunt:Poetry is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity." That this definition, \notwithstanding that it is constructed on the principle of omitting nothing that any one would like to see included, is yet essentially a glimpse from the Baconian side of the shield, is obvious from the fact that its author afterwards uses as synonymous with it the abbreviations "Imaginative passion," "Passion for imaginative pleasure."-Lastly, Mr. Dallas, with all his ingenuity, does not really get much farther in the end. Beginning with an expression of dissatisfaction with all existing definitions of poetry, Aristotle's and Bacon's included, as being definitions of the thing not in itself, but in its acci