ust in reality be a wild beast--a fine
animal, it is true, but still a wild beast--and our own Milton a
polemical pedant arguing by the light of poetry. To such readers, the
spectacle of Ugolino devouring the head of Ruggieri, and wiping his
jaws with the hair that he might tell his story, cannot fail to give a
feeling of horror and disgust, which even the glorious wings of
Dante's angels--the most sublime of all such creations--would fail to
chase away. The poetry of the Divine Comedy belongs to nature; its
superstition, intolerance, and fanaticism, to the thirteenth century.
These last have either passed away from the modern world or they exist
in new forms, and with the first alone can we have any real healthy
sympathy.

One of our literary idols is Shakspeare--perhaps the greatest of them
all; but although the most universal of poets, his works, taken in the
mass, belong to the age of Queen Elizabeth, not to ours. A critic has
well said, that if Shakspeare were now living, he would manifest the
same dramatic power, but under different forms; and his taste, his
knowledge, and his beliefs would all be different. This, however, is
not the opinion of the book-worshippers: it is not the poetry alone of
Shakspeare, but the work bodily, which is preeminent with them; not
that which is universal in his genius, but that likewise which is
restricted by the fetters of time and country. The commentators, in
the same way, find it their business to bring up his shortcomings to
his ideal character, not to account for their existence by the manners
and prejudices of his age, or the literary models on which his taste
was formed. It would be easy to run over, in this way, the list of
all our great authors, and to shew that book-worship, as
contradistinguished from a wise and discriminating respect, is nothing
more than a vulgar superstition.

We are the more inclined to put forth these ideas, at a time when
reprints are the order of the day--when speculators, with a singular
blindness, are ready to take hold of almost anything that comes in
their way without the expense of copyright. It would be far more
judicious to employ persons of a correct and elegant taste to separate
the local and temporary from the universal and immortal part of our
classics, and give us, in an independent form, what belongs to
ourselves and to all time. A movement was made some years ago in this
direction by Mr Craik, who printed in one of Charles Knight's