aust, have made him, in a great degree, an evil influence in
European literature; and Evil is always second-rate.

But the mass of sentimental literature concerned with the analysis and
description of emotion, headed by the poetry of Byron, is altogether
of lower rank than the literature which merely describes what it saw.
The true seer feels as intensely as any one else; but he does not much
describe his feelings. He tells you whom he met, and what they said;
leaves you to make out, from that, what they feel, and what he feels,
but goes into little detail. And, generally speaking, pathetic writing
and careful explanation of passion are quite easy, compared with this
plain recording of what people said, and did; or with the right
invention of what they are likely to say and do; for this reason, that
to invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a
story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage
concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what
happens; which to do, requires a colossal intellect; but to describe a
separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it
oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that
noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of
somebody sitting on the other side of the table. Even, therefore,
where this sentimental literature is first rate, as in passages of
Byron, Tennyson, and Keats, it ought not to be ranked so high as the
creative; and though perfection even in narrow fields is perhaps as
rare as in the wider, and it may be as long before we have another "In
Memoriam" as another "Guy Mannering," I unhesitatingly receive as a
greater manifestation of power, the right invention of a few sentences
spoken by Pleydell and Mannering across their supper-table, than the
most tender and passionate melodies of the self-examining verse.

14. Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, and is happy;
but Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth--and her home is in heaven.
Shut her from the fields of the celestial mountains, bear her from
breathing their lofty, sun-warmed air; and we may as well turn upon
her the last bolt of the Tower of Famine, and give the keys to the
keeping of the wildest surge that washes Capraja and Gorgona.[10]

[10] I leave this passage, as my friend has chosen it; but it is
unintelligible without the contexts, which show how all the emotions
descri