uits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining in the same common
labours, and participating in the same divided glory. In the metropolitan
cities of Europe the same authors are now read, and the same opinions
become established: the Englishman is familiar with Machiavel and
Montesquieu; the Italian and the Frenchman with Bacon and Locke; and the
same smiles and tears are awakened on the banks of the Thames, of the
Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shakspeare, Moliere, and Cervantes--

Contemporains de tous les hommes,
Et citoyens de tous les lieux.

A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Moliere, and discovered the Tartuffe
in the Crimea; and had this ingenious sovereign survived the translation
which he ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of France
might have laid the foundation of good taste even among the Turks and the
Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an
English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the peculiar
characteristics of the historian Guicciardini: the German Schlegel writes
on our Shakspeare like a patriot; and while the Italians admire the noble
scenes which our Flaxman has drawn from their great poet, they have
rejected the feeble attempts of their native artists. Such is the wide and
the perpetual influence of this living intercourse of literary minds.

Scarcely have two centuries elapsed since the literature of every nation
was limited to its fatherland, and men of genius long could only hope for
the spread of their fame in the single language of ancient Rome; which for
them had ceased to be natural, and could never be popular. It was in the
intercourse of the wealth, the power, and the novel arts of the nations of
Europe, that they learned each other's languages; and they discovered
that, however their manners varied as they arose from their different
customs, they participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered
from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived
that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in
abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring
them nearer to each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to form
but one people out of the populace of mankind, they offer their reciprocal
labours; they pledge to each other the same opinions; and that knowledge
which, like a small river, takes its source from one spot, at length
mingles with