which is exercised over our trains of thought by the mere accident of the agreement of arbitrary sounds. In treating of the pleasure which we receive from comparisons in poetry, I remarked, how evidently we still have in view the source of such comparisons, in the spontaneous suggestion of similar objects by similar objects; and how much, therefore, our pleasure is lessened, when the simile, though perhaps sufficiently exact in that analogy which it is intended to express, appears of a kind, which, in the circumstances described, could not be supposed naturally to have arisen to the conception of the individual who uses it. It is the same with that resemblance of mere syllabic sound which we are now considering. It must appear to have its source in spontaneous suggestion, or it ceases to give pleasure. On this account chiefly it is, that alliteration, which delights when sparingly used, becomes offensive when frequently repeated in any short series of lines; not because any one of the reduplications of sound would itself be less pleasing if it had not been preceded by others than those others which preceded it, but because the frequent recurrence of it shews too plainly, that the alliteration has been studiously sought. The suggesting principle, as I have already remarked, is not confined to one set of objects, or to a few; and, though similarity of mere initial sound be one of the relations according to which suggestion may take place, it is far from being the most powerful or constant one. A few syllabic or literal resemblances are, therefore, what may be expected very naturally to occur, particularly in those lighter trains of thought in which there is no strong emotion to modify the suggestion, in permanent relation to one prevailing sentiment. But a series of alliterative phrases is inconsistent with the natural variety of the suggesting principle. It implies a labour of search and selection, and a labour which it is not pleasing to contemplate, because it is employed on an object too trifling to give it interest. In the early ages of verse, indeed, when the skill that is admired must be a species of skill that requires no great refinement to discover it, this very appearance of labour is itself a charm. A never-ceasing alliteration, as it presents a difficulty of which all can readily judge, is, in this period of rude discernment, an obvious mode of forcing admiration;—very much in the same way, as the feats of a rope-dancer or a tumbler never fail to give greater pleasure to a child, and to the vulgar, who in their tastes are always children, than the most graceful attitudes of the dancer in all his harmony of movement,-who does, perhaps, what no one else is capable of doing, but who seems to do it in a way which every one may try to imitate, and who is truly most inimitable when he seems to shew, how very easy it is to execute all the wonders which he performs. Accordingly we find, in the history of our own poetry, and in the poetry of many semi-barbarous nations, that frequent alliteration has been held to be a requisite of verse as indispensable as the metrical pauses on which its melody depends. With the refinement of taste, however, this passion for coarse difficulty subsides; and we begin at last to require, not merely that difficulty should be overcome, but that the labour of overcoming the difficulty should be hid from us, with a care at least equal to that which was used in overcoming it. All that is truly marvellous in art is thus augmented, indeed, rather than lessened. But it is no longer art that must present itself: it is nature only;-" artis est celare artem;"—and that nature to which we look in all the finer intellectual arts, as to the genius which animates them, is the knowledge and observance of the principle which we are considering,-the accordance which we feel of every sentence, and image, and expression, with those laws of spontaneous suggestion in the mind, which seem as if, in the circumstances represented, they might almost, without the assistance of any art, have produced of themselves whatever we admire. We know too well the order of this spontaneous suggestion not to feel, when this alliteration is very frequently repeated, the want of the natural flow of thought, and consequently, the labour which must have been used in the search of sounds that were to be forced reluctantly together. There is no longer any pleasure felt, therefore; or, if any pleasure be felt, it is of a kind totally different from that, which gives an additional charm to the easy flow of verse when the alliteration is sparingly used. There is a poem of some hundred lines, in regular hexameter verse,-the Pugna Porcorum, per Publium Porcium Poetam,-in which there is not a single word introduced that does not begin with the letter P. But what is the pleasure which the foolish ingenuity of such a poem affords? and who is there who could have patience sufficient to read the whole of it aloud, or even to read the whole of it inwardly? As a specimen, I may quote to you a few lines, which are, perhaps, as many as you can bear with patience,-containing a part of the speech of the Proconsul Porcorum, in which he endeavours to win over the younger Pigs to peace : "Propterea properans Proconsul, poplite prono, Propterea petimus, præsentem ponite pugnam, Per pia Porcorum petimus penetralia,” &c.* This, it is evident, is the very vaulting, and tumbling, and rope-dancing of poetry; and, any coarse pleasure which we may receive from it, when we hear or read a part of it for the first time, is not the pleasure of verse, but a pleasure which the wise, indeed, may feel, but which is very much akin to the mere clownish wonderment that fixes the whole village, in the rural fair, around the stage of some itinerant tumbler or fire-eater. The Pugna Porcorum is not the only long piece of alliteration. A similar poem was addressed to Charles the Bald, of which every word, in compliment to the monarch, began with his own initial letter C. So various in all ages, have been these difficiles nuge,this labor ineptiarum,-as Martial calls them,-that poems have been written, deriving their principal, or probably their only recommendation, from a quality, the very opposite to that which conferred so unenviable an immortality on the busy idleness of the Pugna Porcorum. The labour of the poems, to which I now allude, was not to repeat, but to exclude altogether a particular letter,-on which account their authors were termed Leipogrammatists. Thus, we hear of a Greek Iliad, from the first book of which the letter Alpha was excluded; from the second, the letter B, and so on through the whole books of the Iliad, and letters of the alphabet. The same species of laborious trifling, by the report of the traveller Chardin, appears to have prevailed in Persia. One of the * V. 41-49. poets of that country had the honour of reading to his sovereign a poem, in which no admission had been allowed to the letter A. The king, who was tired of listening, and whose weariness had probably too good a cause, returned the poet thanks, and expressed his very great approbation of his omission of the letter A; but added, that, in his opinion, the poem might, perhaps, have been better still, if he had only taken the trouble to omit, at the same time, all the other letters of the Alphabet. In all these cases of studious alliteration, positive or negative, it is very evident, that the natural course of the suggesting principle, must have been checked, and checked almost incessantly; and the constraint and irksomeness which this constant effort involves, are thus every moment forced upon us, till we feel more sympathy with the weariness of the artist, than admiration of the power with which he has been able to struggle through his painful task. We love, indeed, in works of genius, strains of exalted sentiment, and successions of bright and glowing imagery, which are beyond the ordinary suggestions of our own mind; but, even in the very majesty of all that is sublime, or in that transcendent and overwhelming tenderness, which is itself but a softer species of sublimity, while we yield with more than admiration, to the grandeur or the pathos, we still love them to harmonize with the universal principles, on which the spontaneous suggestions of our own humbler thoughts depend. When they do so harmonize, we feel what we read or hear, almost as if it had arisen in our mind, by the principle of spontaneous suggestion, which we know that we partake, in its general tendencies, with the very genius which we revere; and this identity, which we love to feel, with every thing that interests us, as it constitutes, in a great measure, the charm of our moral sympathy, has also, I conceive, no small influence on the kindred emotions of taste, constituting a great portion of the pleasure which we derive from the contemplation of the works of art. The genius which commands our applause, is still the genius of man,—of a being who perceives, remembers, reasons, and exercises every function, of which we are conscious in ourselves. "Homines sumus; humani nihil alienum." We feel, therefore, that it is not our admiration only, that connects us with the works which we admire, but the very faculties which have produced those admirable results. We see our common nature reflected, and re flected with a beauty of which we were not sensible before; and while thought succeeds thought, and image rises upon image, according to the laws of succession, which we have been accustomed to recognize in the trains of our own fancy,-these thoughts and images are, as it were, for the moment, ours; and we have only the delightful impression, that we are of a race of nobler beings than we conceived. This delightful identification, however, lasts only as long as the thoughts and images, that are presented to us, arise in the order in which nature might have spontaneously presented them to our own mind. When there is any obvious and manifest violation of the natural course of suggestion,-as there must be, when the labour of the composition is brought before us, this illusion of identity is dissolved. It is no longer our common nature which we feel; but the toil and constraint which are peculiar to the individual, and which separate him, for the time, from our sympathy. The work of labour seems instantly something insulafed and detached, which we cannot identify with our own spontaneous thought; and we feel for it that coldness, which, by the very constitution of our nature, it is impossible for us not to feel, with respect to every thing which is absolutely foreign. After these remarks, on the influence of the various species of resemblance, in the objects themselves,-in the analogy of some of their qualities, and in the arbitrary symbols, which denote them, I proceed to consider the force of contrast, as a suggesting principle. I consider it, at present, as forming a class apart, for the same reason, which has led me, in these illustrations of the general principle, to class separately the suggestions of resemblance, though, I conceive, that all, or at least the greater number of them, on a more subtile analysis, might be reduced to the more comprehensive influence of former proximity. Of this influence, whether direct or indirect, in contrast, the memory of every one must present him with innumerable instan ces. The palace and the cottage,-the cradle and the grave,-the extremes of indigence and of luxurious splendour, are not connected in artificial antithesis only, but arise, in ready succession, to the observer of either. Of all moral reflections, none are so universal as those which are founded on the instability of mortal distinctions, |