ished to the author the beauties which they admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every school-boy
thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, and
knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the broad cheeks of
the Squire, as well as the faces of his own playfellows. The most
experienced and fastidious judges are amazed at the perfection of that
art which extracts inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human
calamities without once violating the reverence due to it; at that
discriminating delicacy of touch which makes a character exquisitely
ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace, or its dignity. In
Don Quixote are several dissertations on the principles of poetic and
dramatic writing. No passages in the whole work exhibit stronger marks
of labour and attention; and no passages in any work with which we
are acquainted are more worthless and puerile. In our time they would
scarcely obtain admittance into the literary department of the Morning
Post. Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration
which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not
lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose
works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does
not venture to walk in the same line with the bombastic Statius. His
admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry. If, indeed, it had been
excited by the elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman
poet, it would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is
rather as an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of
imagination, that he values the Aeneid. The most trivial passages he
regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of the most recondite
meaning. He describes his conductor as the sea of all wisdom--the sun
which heals every disordered sight. As he judged of Virgil, the Italians
of the fourteenth century judged of him; they were proud of him; they
praised him; they struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled for
the honour of possessing his remains; they maintained professors
to expound his writings. But what they admired was not that mighty
imagination which called a new world into existence, and made all its
sights and sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said
little of those awful and lovely creations on which later critics
delight to dwell--Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil