our eyes; and by such a description, a stick | works of these poetic artists there is acknowlof wood, stuck full of copper nails, is made edged by all a want of unity and want of the significant usher of a line of heroic im- action, which ranks them far below the moages, representing dignity and authority in dels of antiquity. every grade. Again, when Achilles swears by his sceptre, the poet traces it from the green tree upon its native mountains to the hands of the hero, acquiring attributes of dignity. The delineation of the bow of Pandarus is another wonderful instance of the skill of the poet, who attaches to it a high degree of interest. It has long been a matter of wonder among critics that Dryden, a poet of inferior skill to Pope in the management of verse, should be generally better esteemed by the ripest judges. We believe that an inquiry into the peculiarities of these writers will establish for the elder of the two a great superiority in epic force, in the qualities of action and vital unity. The imitators of Pope and Dryden, understanding nothing of the true vitality of art, imitated only their versification, their antithetic turn, and their epigrammatic point. That the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were ignorant of the true principles of classic art, discovered or revived by Lessing, we have evidence enough to fill entire libraries, libraries commenting on, and imitating in a frigid manner, the classic unities. Impressed with the idea that unity was necessary to a work of art, they conceived of it as an artificial band, holding the parts of the work together, as the tire of a wheel gives unity, and not as the specific or vital principle of an animal gives unity to it. In treating of the episode and of episodic description, mechanical critics have regarded them as so many ornamental flourishes nailed or stuck upon the body of the work, and for which any other might have been substituted with equal propriety. In the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, of which there is a translated American edition, we find an apparent and continued effort on the part of those great writers and critics to solve the epic and dramatic problem of unity, independently of Lessing, and almost without reference to him, and with signal ill-success. The criticisms of Goethe and Schiller have no entireness, and show the dimmest appreciation of the root principle of epos and drama-an appreciation so dim, the uninitiated reader will perhaps never discover it at all; and in the The purposes of art are simple, and not speculative; its materials derived from nature and tradition, and not from excogitation and analysis; and perhaps it is impossible for any but a people whose actions are free and unrestrained, who have great and national purposes, simple and heroic views, and an experience of life, varied upon sea and land, in peace and war, and through the vicissitudes of calamity and brilliant fortune, to produce an original and classic school of poetry,-a people who believe, or incline to believe, that what they think and can do is the best, saving what their fathers thought and did before them, and who scorn and detest the barbarism and corruption of neighboring monarchies. Had Greece been flooded with an Asiatic literature, generated from the vice and luxury of courts, would she ever have produced a Homer or an Aristotle ? And will America ever produce great writers and artists who will transmit our glory to future generations, while she is cloyed and debilitated with the sweet and sickly literature of French libertinism and English servilism? Great geniuses may be, indeed, in a measure, self-developed, but the imitative instinct puts them in strong and intimate sympathy with the age, the men, and the books with whom they converse. Let the young poet, and whoever wishes to excel as a writer and a speaker, beware of his company. If he associates with triflers, neglecting the harsh and disciplinary contacts of duty and business, and if, instead of serious poems and histories, he steeps his intellect in the muddy floods of sentimental fiction, the trifling and sensual, his moral power must decline, the pride and freedom of his soul be impaired, his hours of thought expended in useless reverie or idle criticism; despondency and low despair will take the place of manly ambition. To the inexperienced it is perhaps necessary to add this caution-not to mistake verbal and rhetorical criticism, and classical nibbling, for a study of great models. Sublime and beautiful works should be read as one views a majestic landscape, by a rapid and comprehensive glance. Magnitude is said to be an element of the sublime. To appreciate the sublimity of Milton or Homer, one must take in all at once an entire member of their work,-a secret of criticism which, unhappily, few of our classical scholars possess; for these gentlemen judge a man's scholarship by the neatness and prosody of his quotations from Horace, and their knowledge of the great writers of their own and other tongues is ofttimes more correct than organic; but the poet and the writer who works from a central, living principle, must work from a consciousness very different from that of the analyst, or dissector. English treatises of criticism too often resemble a hand-book called the Dublin Dissector, which the student holds in his left hand open, while, with the scalpel in his right, he separates the integument from the muscle. The treatise of Lessing, on the contrary, deserves to be called an organic treatise, because it shows us the vital principle in the living work. seems to be a creator, or inventor, in the right sense. America has produced many authors who have excelled in the description of natural scenery. Every one is familiar with the exquisite delineations of Bryant and Longfellow, in those beautiful and pathetic little poems, "The Water-fowl," and the "Loss of the Hesperus." There are touches in these of natural description unsurpassed in their kind. Many of equal or superior beauty are quoted by the readers of Tennyson; but these excellent poets do not describe for the sake of describing; they do not encroach upon the province of the landscape painter; they speak only of what we have seen and are familiar with, and then give us the changes, dramatic motives and pathetic incidents, which the phenomena of nature occasion, attend, or suggest. They combine in their poems the two-fold genius of ode and elegy; the elegy describing and lamenting past scenes, the ode, interior passions of an instant. In all that they write there is motion and life, and therefore, we dare say, they are popular and admired. In the seventeenth section our author dwells at length upon the impropriety of detailed delineations of bodily objects in poetry. The signs of speech are arbitrary. When a word is uttered, or written, it signifies nothing to the hearer or reader except by reference to his own experience. The poet cannot describe a thing which no one general, the power of delineating a bodily whole, "I do not deny," says Lessing, "to speech in has ever seen, so that the imagination shall by means of its separate parts; this it possesses, receive it. He can describe only the changes, because its signs, although consecutive, are yet arcombinations, and actions of things that bitrary. But I deny that this power is possessed have been seen and are already known, or by speech, considered as the mechanical means of which the imagination shapes from experi- would be deficient in that illusion on which poepoetry, because such verbal delineations of bodies ence, or from pictorial representations. Mil- try mainly rests; and for this plain reason, that ton's angels have a human form, speak the the entireness of the body being destroyed by the English language, and their music was the consecutive nature of the discourse, and an analmusic known to Milton; their armor is that ysis of the whole into its parts being thus effected, of English knights, their artillery the mod-ination, must always be a work of very great diffithe ultimate reunion of those parts, in the imag ern cannon. Thus, in the detail of his work, the greatest of all inventors invented nothing. He could change, he could magnify; he could darken and illuminate, combine and put in action; he could inspire his angels with the great passion familiar to his own spirit; he could give them the theology and the skepticism which agitated his own intellect, and there invention ceased. His learning tills out the work coldly and heavily, the pedant and poet contending for mastery; his detailed descriptions of things without action, leave the imagination dull and stagnant; but when he puts in motion the angelic hosts, we hear the clash of armor, the sound of chariot-wheels, and the thunder of artillery-your bosoms burn with the ardor of the fight-and then the poet culty, and in many cases would even be impossible. Where, therefore, no illusive effect is required, where the understanding of the reader alone is addressed, and where the only aim of the author is to convey distinct, and, as far as possible, complete ideas, those delineations of bodies which are excluded from poetry, properly so called, may with perfect propriety be introduced, and may be employed with much advantage not only by the prose writer, but by the didactic poet, who is, in fact, no poet at all." Lessing quotes instances from Virgil of purely didactic and descriptive poetry, which are only a more agreeable paraphrase of prose, and exhibit skill in language, and a knowledge of husbandry, and nothing more. "Except in such cases as these, the detailed delineation of bodily objects-without the Homeric artifice of rendering co-existent parts actually con secutive, to which I have already alluded-has | portant figures are at rest. A forest scene always been regarded by the best critics as an may indicate the movement of a tempest so uninteresting and trifling performance, for which little or no genius is required. When the poetaster as to produce a perfect illusion, without viofeels himself at a loss, he sets to work, as Horace lating the unity and fixed lights and shadows tells us, to delineate a grove, an altar, a rivulet of the whole. There is a broad margin almeandering through pleasant meadows, a rapid lowed in all arts for an apparent departure stream, or perhaps a rainbow." from their peculiar principles. "When the judgment of Pope had become matured by years and experience, he looked back, we are told, with great contempt on the pictorial essays of his youthful muse. He insisted that it was indispensable for any one who desired to render himself really worthy of the name of a poet, to renounce as early as possible the taste for dry delineation; and compared a merely descriptive poem to a feast composed of nothing but sauces." Lessing recommends that the poet who has conceived a work in which a series of images are brought forward, with sentiments sparingly interwoven, should change his plan, and make his poem a series of sentiments with but a slight admixture of images, But, after all, the most perfect descriptive poem must consist of an indistinguishable mixture, a perfect blending of imagery and senti ment. The eighteenth section of our author's work continues the subject. The practice of certain painters who have represented in one picture an entire story-as when Titian gives in one piece the entire story of the Prodigal Son; or as if Cole's four pictures of the Course of Life had been blended into one piece is condemned as an encroachment of the painter upon the territory of the poet, and serves to show that successions, not in time, but in space, are the proper sphere of the painter. Lessing argues an equal absurdity in those poetical descriptions which give scenes without motion from object to object. And yet there is a certain liberty allowed, both to the painter and the poet. The painter may unite two distinct moments in the posture of a figure. The artist may have the sense and the courage to force a rule of art, in order to attain a greater perfection of expression. The poet may dwell momentarily upon an object, suspending, for a certain time, the entire movement of his piece. The painter may sometimes represent a falling body with effect, as has been done by Hogarth; but these are accidental to the main design, and rather heighten than impair the harmony of the whole. Thus, the figures on the right and left of a picture, may seem to be in rapid action, while the more im One of the most brilliant chapters in this work is the critique on the two descriptions of a shield-the shield of Achilles, by Homer, and the shield of Æneas, by Virgil. "Homer," says Lessing, "has composed upwards of a hundred magnificent verses in describing every circumstance connected with the shield of Achilles -its form, the material of which it was composed, and the figures with which its immense surface was covered, so minutely, and so exactly, that modern sculptors have found no difficulty in executing imiThis wonderful example of poetic painting is exetations of it, corresponding in every particular. cuted by Homer without the least departure from the principle adhered to by him throughout his work. The shield is epically described that is to say, created out of the rude iron and brass, by the and successively into view; the orb rises from an hands of the poet. Its figures spring gradually edge to its full splendor. Homer brings before our eyes not so much the shield itself, however, as the divine artist who is employed in making it. We cannot forbear noticing, at this opportunity, that of mechanical and agricultural labor are the most all descriptions in the ancient poets, those of interesting and exquisitely wrought. The idea of indignity or disgrace did not attach itself, in the sublime age of the epos, to mechanical labor. The stigma seems to be feudal, and is certainly the disgrace of our time. Thank God, we are ap proaching a new age, when labor shall no longer be a disgrace, but shall be dignified, as in heroic ages, by sages and poets, with the highest honors and men are free, when they have ceased to 'love of humanity; and in the day when toil is honored a lord,' perhaps we shall have other heroes and poets, it may be, even greater than those of antiquity-but not while we are cursed with a servile literature, and a more servile art. with his hammer and pincers, and when he has "We see the divine artist approach the anvil finished forging the plate out of the rough ore, we perceive the figures destined for their embellishment, rising one after another from the surface beneath the judicious strokes of his hammer. We labor is completed, and then the amazement with never once lose sight of the workman, until his which we regard his work is mingled with the confident faith of eye-witnesses to its execution." Is not the above the finest piece of criticism that ever escaped a modern pen-the richest in suggestion, the most refined and discriminating, and with the greatest possible breadth of appreciation? Certainly nothing in Longinus approaches it, in com prehensiveness; and to have surpassed Longinus is to have surpassed all critics, not even excepting the favorite Goethe, whose subtleties, entitled criticisms, show, indeed, wonderful observation, but fall short in comprehensiveness, in the place of which they have often only mysteriousness. In the criticism of Lessing, the artist finds laid open for him, and clearly expressed, the rules by which he must work, if ever he succeed; rules derived not from speculation, but from a truly Baconian analysis (with an aesthetic guidance) of the greatest works that have been produced. The twentieth section of the Laocoön, following out the principle already laid down by our author, prohibits the description of personal beauty by the poet, except in the most general terms. Homer tells us that Nireus was beautiful-that Achilles was still more so, and that the beauty of Helen was divine. "Nowhere do we find him entering into a circumstantial delineation of these examples of beauty; yet the beauty of Helen was the very pivot on which turns the entire fabric of the poem. How luxuriantly would one of our modern poets have dwelt on its details." These elaborate encroachments upon the province of the painter create confusion, and confusion only, in the imagination. The painter or the statuary can alone give us the picture or the statue of a Helen. After quoting an example. from the Italians of this kind of description, Lessing draws a distinction between admiration for an artist and admiration for his work. We may admire the artist for the knowledge he displays, and the beautiful materials he brings together; we may condemn the work from its failure to produce a powerful and simple effect upon the imagination. Beauty should be described in poetry by its effects alone, by the grace of its actions, and by the admiration and the ardor which it excites. Virgil's description of the shield of Æneas is treated by Lessing with great severity, and apparently with great justice. Moral simplicity of intention is wanting in the work. It is made a vehicle of flattery. Virgil introduces us to a view of the god Vulcan busied with the Cyclops, and produces a few celebrated lines. He then leads us off into a different scene; Venus and Æneas appear together in conversation; the shield is leaning against the trunk of an oak-it might have been any other tree, or a rock. The hero Æneas has already inspected, and admired, and handled the arms in a very common-place manner, which only excites the restless desire of the reader to get him out of the way, and handle them for one's self. And then follows what Lessing pronounces to be a tame and tedious description, made The only remaining topic of general inby the poet, of the figures wrought upon terest touched upon in the Laocoon, is the the shield, while Venus and Æneas stand by, use of deformity as a subject in art. It is either whispering in a side scene, or with argued that deformity is not a fit subject for signs of great impatience, we may suppose, the painter or the statuary, but is very for the poet to have done with his tedious proper for the uses of poetry; to this, howciceronism and cease from making them ever, there must be certain liberties permitridiculous. "Homer," says Lessing," makes ted, since deformity may be used to set off the god elaborate the decorations of the beauty, even in painting; and we know that shield because he, the divine artist, with in the department of humorous painting, that high moral simplicity which character- deformity is employed with great effect. izes true art, desires to produce a piece of The examination of this part of the Laoworkmanship worthy of his skill. Virgil, coon requires a separate treatment; and on the contrary, would lead us to imagine with every acknowledgment of his great that the shield was executed for the sake of genius, we here take our leave of the author the ornaments." A degradation of the ar- with a protest and reservation against these mor itself, of the poet, and of the divine artist, conclusions of his twenty-fourth and twentyHephistos. fifth chapters. J. D. W. AMERICAN DIPLOMACY WITH THE BARBARY POWERS. THEIR PIRACIES AND AGGRESSIONS. SINCE the conquest of Algiers by the civilization have made imperative, and which French, the Barbary Powers have become may be regarded as comparatively humane. wholly insignificant among the nations of Both conducted like savages, and both disthe earth. They are virtually blotted from honored the religion they professed. No the roll of nations, and are hardly known | cruelties were too severe to inflict on the except through history. A half century ago prisoners of either party. Christians were they held an important position, and if they reduced to the most abject and cruel slavery, did not command the respect of all Europe, while on the other hand Mohammedans they certainly made claims and enforced were compelled to suffer the severest torthem as no other civilized or half-civilized tures, and even death. But in this merciless nation would have dared to do. In their warfare the Barbary States always had the diplomatic relations they were peculiar advantage. They were well fitted for a presetting at defiance the law of nations recog-datory warfare. They found ample protecnized by the civilized world, and adopting as their rule of action the piratical code. They were generally known by the name of Corsair States, a name which they well earned by their piracies, cruelty and treach ery. It is not our purpose to give a particular description of these States. At the beginning of the present century, the population consisted of several distinct races of men, believers in the Mohammedan religion, and acknowledging a partial connection with the Turkish empire, though acting in a good degree independent of that government. They had been Mohammedan for more than ten centuries, and for a long period were the terror of all Europe. They pushed their conquests into Spain, and remained the possessors and masters of a portion of that country for several hundred years, contending with the Christian, and attempting to supplant his religion. It was not till the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella that the Moors were expelled from Spain for ever, and that Europe began to feel that Mohammedan power had extended to its utmost limits. It is not at all surprising that the constant warfare between the Christians and Mohammedans had created a feeling of hostility between them, which neither a sense of justice or humanity could control. At first it is probable that both parties were alike regardless of those rules of war which modern tion both in their mode of life and the natural position of their country. War was the means by which they lived, and though they were repulsed and their towns destroyed, yet they were never conquered. As soon as their enemies disappeared, they came forth from their hiding places, and were ready to plunder anew, and reduce their enemies to captivity. By this warfare a system of Christian slavery had grown up in the Barbary States, which to us seems almost incredible. Europeans were slaves to Africans, and drank to the dregs the bitter cup which such bondage imposed. What number of Christian slaves there were at any one time in those States we have now no information. In the beginning of the sixteenth century there were 30,000 employed in building the mole which connects Algiers with an island in its harbor; and at the destruction of Tunis in 1635, ten thousand were liberated by the army of Charles V. They were engaged in the construction of all the public works, and performed the most severe as well as servile tasks. So grievous had it become that all Europe suffered. The Pope offered pardon to all who should undertake a deliverance to the captives, and immediate entrance into paradise to all who fell in so laudable an undertaking. The army of Charles V. consisted of 30,000 selected troops from Germany, Italy, and Spain, and in the destruction of Tunis it apparently gained a most |