difficult task, but a necessary one for any one who takes this work
in hand. How far our author has attained these ends, others must
decide. I am sure that he will not have failed from forgetting
them. He has, I believe, faithfully studied all the documents of
the period within his reach, making little use of modern narratives;
he has meditated upon the past in its connection with the present;
has never allowed his reading to become dry by disconnecting it with
what he has seen and felt, or made his partial experiences a measure
for the acts which they help him to understand. He has entered upon
his work at least in a true and faithful spirit, not regarding it as
an amusement for leisure hours, but as something to be done
seriously, if done at all; as if he was as much 'under the Great
Taskmaster's eye' in this as in any other duty of his calling. In
certain passages and scenes he seemed to me to have been a little
too bold for the taste and temper of this age. But having written
them deliberately, from a conviction that morality is in peril from
fastidiousness, and that it is not safe to look at questions which
are really agitating people's hearts merely from the outside--he
has, and I believe rightly, retained what I should from cowardice
have wished him to exclude. I have no doubt, that any one who wins
a victory over the fear of opinion, and especially over the opinion
of the religious world, strengthens his own moral character, and
acquires a greater fitness for his high service.

Whether Poetry is again to revive among us, or whether the power is
to be wholly stifled by our accurate notions about the laws and
conditions under which it is to be exercised, is a question upon
which there is room for great differences of opinion. Judging from
the past, I should suppose that till Poetry becomes less self-
conscious, less self-concentrated, more _dramatical_ in spirit, if
not in form, it will not have the qualities which can powerfully
affect Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most national age
dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those
who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take
away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales
become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere
versions of French or Italian Fables. Milton may have been right in
changing the form of the Paradise Lost,--we are bound to believe
that he was right