you that it is the very football of the
holiday-afternoon imps below. They kick it for pastime; they are
intelligences perverted. The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic,
they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity. But--sharply comic,
adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the interwinding with human
affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our Poet,
between whom and us yawn Time's most hollow jaws. Surely we owe a little
to Time, to cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our
country. Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning breach, if only
perusers will rally to the philosophic standard. They are sick of the
woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course to the roaring
frivolous. Well, if not dozens, half-dozens; gallant pens are alive; one
can speak of them in the plural. I venture to say that they would be
satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement. They would
perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance
for an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold
them fast. But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected. The
example might, one hopes, create a taste. A great modern writer, of
clearest eye and head, now departed, capable in activity of presenting
thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned over his puppetry, that he dared
not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive
brainstuff. He could have done it, and he is of the departed! Had he
dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art in dignity
on a level with History; to an interest surpassing the narrative of
public deeds as vividly as man's heart and brain in their union excel his
plain lines of action to eruption. The everlasting pantomime, suggested
by Mrs. Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not
unrighteously, by our graver seniors. They name this Art the pasture of
idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population which has taken to
reading; and which soon discovers that it can write likewise, that sort
of stuff at least. The forecast may be hazarded, that if we do not
speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction,
under the shining multitude of its professors. They are fast capping the
candle. Instead, therefore, of objurgating the timid intrusions of
Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you. History without her is the
skeleton map of eve