improve the heart and refine
the mind, as well as fascinate the imagination. It may be doubted if they
ever will be equalled: excelled they can never be.

Whoever will study those inimitable productions, even when standing to
gaze at the engravings from them in a print-shop window, will have no
difficulty in feeling the justice of Cicero's remark, that all the arts
which relate to humanity have a certain common bond, a species of
consanguinity between them. The emotion produced by the highest excellence
in them all is the same. So intense is this emotion, so burning the
delight which it occasions, that it cannot be borne for any length of
time: the mind's eye is averted from it as the eyeball is from the line of
"insufferable brightness," as Gray calls it, which often precedes the
setting of the sun. It is difficult to say in which this burning charm
consists. Like genius or beauty, its presence is felt by all, but can be
described by none. It would seem to be an emanation of Heaven--a chink, as
it were, opened, which lets us feel for a few seconds the ethereal joys of
a superior state of existence. But it is needless to seek to define what,
all who have felt it must acknowledge, passes all understanding.

It is a common saying, even among persons of cultivated taste, that it is
hopeless to attempt to advance any thing new on the beauties of ancient
authors; that every thing that can be said on the subject has already
been exhausted, and that it is in the more recent fields of modern
literature that it is alone possible to avoid repetition. We are decidedly
of opinion that this idea is erroneous, and that its diffusion has done
more than any thing else to degrade criticism to the low station which,
with some honourable exceptions, it has so long held in the world of
letters. But when ancient excellence is contemplated with a generous eye,
even when the mind that sees is but slenderly gifted, who will say that
nothing new will occur? When it meets kindred genius, when it is elevated
by a congenial spirit, what a noble art does criticism become? What has it
proved in the hands of Dryden and Pope, of Wilson and Macaulay? It is in
the contemplation of ancient greatness, and its comparison with the
parallel efforts of modern genius, that the highest flights of these
gifted spirits have been attained, and the native generosity of real
intellectual power most strikingly evinced. Criticism of words will soon
come to an end; the