ted to us by some
of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the
position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the
composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean,
seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our
country a Land of Experimental Knowledge."

The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who
has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation
of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written.

"If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep
it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose
but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a
tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he
adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that
requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be
either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the
_Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the
storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair
weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful
_Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is
the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de
Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he
wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec
Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken
through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his
_Verses_."

Madame de Stael's _Germany_, one of the most famous of the "national
character" books, begins with a description of the German landscape.
But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael,
questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as
affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact
and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of
these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious
than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a
hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory that climate
acts directly upon literary products, said wittily of Greece: "The figs
are as fine as ever, but where are the Pindars?" The theory of race, in
particular, has been sha