and
hushed up. We proclaim poetry for an organ of the highest, profoundest
truth. But every now and then, when we are in difficulties, we shroud
the poet and ourselves under the undeniable fact, that poetry is
fiction; and under that pretext, wildly and wickedly would throw off all
responsibility from him, and from ourselves, his retainers and abettors;
and yet something, after all, is to be conceded to the mask of the poet.
All nations and times have agreed in not judging him by the prosaic
laws to which we who write and speak prose are amenable. His is a
playful part, and he has a knack of slipping from under the hand of
serious judgment. He is a Proteus, and feels himself bound to speak the
bare truth only when he is reduced to his proper person, not whilst he
is exercising his preternatural powers of illusion. He holds in his
grasp the rod of the Enchanter, Pleasure, and with a touch he unnerves
the joints that would seize and drag him before the seat of an ordinary
police. But we must remember that we are now scrawling unprivileged
prose; and beware that we do not, like other officious and uncautious
partizans, bring down upon our own defenceless heads the sword which the
delinquency of them mightier far has roused from the scabbard.

Let us see, then, how stands the case of such satirists.

War enters into the kingdom of the Muses. Rival wits assail one
another--Dryden and Shadwell. _Nec dis nec viribus aequis._ This is a
duel--_impar congressus Achillei_. But when Pope undertakes to hunt down
the vermin of literature, this is no distraction of the Parnassian realm
by civil war. This is the lawful magistrate going forth, armed perhaps
with extraordinary powers, to clear an infested district of vulgar
malefactors and notorious bad characters.

Vile publishers, vile critics, vile scribblers of every denomination, in
prose and verse--all those who turn the press, that organ of light for
the world, into an engine of darkness--who may blame the poet for
clothing them in such curses as shall make them for all time at once
loathsome and laughable in Christian lands?

Letters! sent by heaven for accomplishing the gift of speech. The
individual thinker, by turning his thoughts into words, advances himself
in the art and power of thought--unravels, clears up, and establishes
the movements of "the shadowy tribes of mind." And so the federal
republic of nations, by turning the spoken word into the written,
advance their f