e might be almost led to conclude, that mental as well as physical
power, after attaining a certain perfection, became weakened by
expansion, and sunk into a state of comparative imbecility, until time
and circumstance gave it a new progressive impetus. One great cause of
this deterioration is the insatiable thirst for novelty, which, becoming
weary even of excellence, will "sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey
on garbage." In the torpidity produced by an utter exhaustion of sensual
enjoyment, the Arreoi Club of Otaheite is recorded to have found a
miserable excitement, by swallowing the most revolting filth; and the
jaded intellectual appetites of more civilized communities will
sometimes seek a new stimulus in changes almost as startling. Some
adventurous writer, unable to obtain distinction among a host of
competitors, all better qualified than himself to win legitimate
applause, strikes out a fantastic or monstrous innovation; and arrests
the attention of many who would fall asleep over monotonous excellence.
Imitators are soon found;--fashion adopts the new folly;--the old
standard of perfection is deemed stale and obsolete;--and thus, by
degrees, the whole literature of a country becomes changed and
deteriorated. It appears to us, that we are now labouring in a crisis of
this nature. In our last Number, we noticed the revolution in our
poetry; the transition from the lucid terseness and exquisite polish of
Pope and Goldsmith, to the rambling, diffuse, irregular, and imaginative
style of composition by which the present era is characterized; and we
might have added, that a change equally complete, though diametrically
opposite in its tendency, has been silently introduced into our prose.
In this we have oscillated from freedom to restraint;--from the easy,
natural, and colloquial style of Swift, Addison and Steele, to the
perpetually strained, ambitious, and overwrought stiffness, of which the
author we are now considering affords a striking exemplification. "He's
knight o' the shire, and represents them all." There is not the smallest
keeping in his composition:--less solicitous what he shall say, than how
he shall say it, he exhausts himself in a continual struggle to produce
effect by dazzling, terrifying, or surprising. Annibal Caracci was
accused of an affectation of muscularity, and an undue parade of
anatomical knowledge, even upon quiescent figures: But the artist whom
we are now considering has no quiesc