with knowledge! how associating and strong his imagination! and with what prompt skill did he bring all learning, ancient and modern, to add dignity and beauty to his Paradise Lost! So again, Spenser: his fairy visions are not fuller of fancies than realities; of fable and fiction, than of historical knowledge and philosophical truth: like a rich, convertible field, that bears in succession every variety of grain, and whose flowers are not weeds stinting any useful produce; but beautiful grasses, which at once adorn the scene, and fructify the soil. We may, indeed, allow Spenser, with that amiable modesty which so distinguished his character, to call himself

"apprentice of the skill,

That whilome in divinest wits did rayne *."

Yet was he most truly a master genius, with all literature at his command, and bending it into his service, not like a manufacturer of art, but a genuine son of inspiration.

Butler was a genius of another school, but a poet; a caricaturist as to characters, but a real painter in his descriptions; a man of whim in the temper of his writings, but a man of science, of the most combining and diversified imagination. No writer, ancient or modern, has displayed more learning, and enclosed it within a smaller space, than has Butler in his first canto of Hudibras. It cannot be said of his learning, as he says of his knight's wit,

As being loth to wear it out,
And therefore bore it not about;

for it was ready on all occasions; and, like his Taliacotius, whose doctrine, however, he has inaccurately stated, Butler fills up every vacuity with extracts from more living parts, and the supplements of most substantial knowledge.

What is sometimes chanted so of Shakspeare is trite and untrue, too ambiguous at least for an exception to a general rule. The controversy that ends in determining against the learning of Shakspeare, has established his philosophy. For against what learning has it determined? Against his acquaintance with the learned languages. And what are languages? The mere shell, of which literature is the kernel, -the mere convoy, of which the arts and sciences are the freight. The nation that was a sort of republic in literature; the nation that so abounded with philosophers, and poets, and painters; the nation that still lives in the annals of literature, while others have been long extinguished; the nation to which all the learned in Europe are proud to become translators and commentators; the nation to which we are still looking, as prodigies of science, mirrors of genius, and the standards of taste; the nation who, in short, are the oracles of our public schools and of our universities;-that nation knew but one language.

Shakspeare had the inward clothing of a fine mind; the outward covering of solid reading, of critical observation, and the richest eloquence; and compared with these, what are the trappings of the schools? Shall we

say of knowledge what Lord Monboddo says of the first philosophy, viz. of his metaphysics? that it is only to be learned in Ægypt, and the writings of Plato and Ari

stotle * ?

"The poet's eye in a fine phrensy rolling†,"

is the eye of inspiration, which pierces truth, though it may be too cursory and rapid to take in all the minuter connecting parts. Dryden, indeed, says of our immortal bard, "that he wanted not the spectacles of books to read nature." He then used them without wanting them; for use them he certainly did. That he has made mistakes in chronology, history, and geography, violated the unities of Aristotle, and sometimes broken Priscian's head, that he was, in short, but a smatterer in what is called book-learning, this may be admitted. But what do his historical plays show, if not, that he was tolerably read, though only through the medium of translations, in the history of his own country, and the history of other countries too? What his appropriate allusions, his characteristic illustrations, his splendid descriptions, his diversified associations, but a certain share of reading and literary converse, with an immense deal of observation? The Midsummer Night's Dream shows him acquainted with the points of ancient history on which his play turns, as much as if he had read Diogenes Laertius and Plu

* Ancient Metaphysics, by Lord Monboddo, vol. ii. book i

ch. 1.

+ Midsummer Night's Dream.

+ Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare.

tarch's Lives in the Greek; and with the fairy mythology of the North, as well as if he had read Olaus Magnus and Bartholinus, or drunk at the spring-head of the northern languages. In short, as one ESSAY ON THE LEARNING OF SHAKSPEARE* never could prove, though attempting to prove, that Shakspeare was conversant in the learned languages; so could not the other, nor did it attempt, that he was not a man of reading. It only shows, to use the writer's own words, that "Shakspeare wanted not the stilts of language to raise him above other

men."

Stress has been laid here on few cases only: but a position, that a poetical mind is always more or less philosophical and literary, should be accompanied, though only in incidental hints, with more general illustration.

What, then, were the first Grecian poets after Homer, such as Hesiod and Pindar? what the chief of the Latin Poets, Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid? Some of the first scholars or the first philosophers of their time; to each of whom we may apply

Namque canebat uti magnum per inane coactum
Semina terrarumque, animæque, marisque fuissent,
Et liquidi simul ignis.

Virgil. Ecl. vi.

* Mr. Peter Whalley, the editor of Ben Jonson, wrote an Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare, ia which he attempts to show that Shakspeare was acquainted with and imitated the classic writers of Greece and Rome. This doctrine is confuted by Dr. Farmer, by producing the very passages of the old Translations, and other old English books, from which Shakspeare borrowed.

The Italian poets, whether they wrote in Latin, or their own language, must be ranked among the revivers of literature, and were its zealous supporters; the Corneilles, Racines, Boileaus, and Voltaires of France, were, besides their poetical characters, critics and philosophers.

Pursue the course of poetry in England, and you will find it accompanied with literature. Chaucer, the first of our poets, in reference to the change of our language from the Saxon, of much account, was well acquainted with all the literature of his time, and with something better. Cowley was, from his earliest childhood, devoted to study: Milton was unacquainted scarcely with any branch of literature, and would have immortalized his name had he left only his prose-works behind him: Dryden possessed a well-furnished mind, and was a prose writer of the most varied excellence: Pope converted all he read and all he saw into harmonious rime: Collins, a bard of powerful imagination, had been a deep thinker, and a successful student: and Gray, though an enemy to the mathematics, was, in other respects, a most polished, fastidious scholar: poets these of the first eminence among us. They by their literature enriched their poetry; and what they borrowed from the public stock of art and science, they repaid with interest, by the pleasure and instruction which they afford mankind. Similar examples too might be shown in our own time, to prove, that the relation here contended for is real, and that those who have obtained any notice for their poetry, were per