do good service too. His entry on this field, however, was later than his entry on the field of philosophy. True, there had been, contemporary with the Scottish philosophers, or even anterior to them, Scottish poets and general prose-writers of note-Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, King James, Buchanan, Sir David Lindsay, Henderson, Sir George Mackenzie, Allan Ramsay, and the like. True, also, in those snatches of popular ballad and song which came down from generation to generation in Scotland-many of them written by no one knows who, and almost all of them overflowing with either humour or melancholy-there was at once a fountain and a promise of an exquisite national literature. We could think of old Nicol Burn, the "violer," till our eyes filled with

tears.

"But minstrel Burn cannot assuage

His woes while time endureth,

To see the changes of this age
Which fleeting time procureth.
Full many a place stands in hard case
Where joy was wont beforrow,

With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes,

And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow."

There was literature in the times when such old strains were sung. But the true avatar of the Scottish mind in modern literature, came later than the manifestation of the same mind in philosophy. Were we to fix a precise date for it, we should name the period of Burns's first visit to Edinburgh and familiar meetings with the men of literary talent and distinction then assembled there. Edinburgh was, indeed, even then a literary capital, boasting of its Monboddos, and Stewarts, and Robertsons, and Blairs, and Mackenzies, and Gregorys-men who had already begun the race of literary rivalry with their contemporaries south of the Tweed. But, so far as the literary excellence of these men did not depend on their participation in that tendency to abstract thinking which had already produced its special fruit in the Scottish Philosophy, it consisted in little more than a reflection or imitation of what was already common and acknowledged in the prior or contemporary literature of South Britain. To write essays such as those of the

Spectator; to be master of a style which Englishmen should pronounce pure, and to produce compositions in that style worthy of being ranked with the compositions of English authors such was the aim and aspiration of Edinburgh literati, between whom and their London cousins there was all the difference that there is between the latitude of Edinburgh and the latitude of London, between the daily use of the broad Scotch dialect and the daily use of the classic English. For Scotland this mere imitation of English models was but a poor and unsatisfactory vein of literary enterprise. What was necessary was the appearance of some man of genius who should flash through all that, and who, by the application to literature, or the art of universal expression, of that same Scottish habit of emphasis which had already produced such striking and original results in philosophy, should teach the Scottish nation its true power in literature, and show a first example of it. Such a man was Burns. He it was who, uniting emotional fervour with intellectual emphasis, and drawing his inspiration from all those depths of sentiment in the Scottish people which his predecessors, the philosophers, had hardly so much as touched, struck for the first time a new chord, and revealed for the first time what a Scottish writer could do by trusting to the whole wealth of Scottish resources. And from the time of Burns, accordingly, there has been a series of eminent literary Scotchmen quite different from that series of hard logical Scotchmen who had till then been the most conspicuous representatives of their country in the eyes of the reading public of Great Britain-a series of Scotchmen displaying to the world the power of emphatic sentiment and emphatic expression as strikingly as their predecessors had displayed the power of emphatic reasoning. While the old philosophic energy of Scotland still remained unexhausted-the honours of Reid, and Hume, and Smith, and Stewart passing on to such men as Brown, and Mill, and Mackintosh, and Hamilton (in favour of the last of whom even Germany has resigned her philosophic interregnum)—the specially literary energy which had been awakened in the country descended along another line in the

persons of Scott, and Jeffrey, and Chalmers, and Campbell, and Wilson, and Carlyle. Considering the amount of influence exerted by such men upon the whole spirit and substance of British literature, considering how disproportionate a share of the whole literary produce of Great Britain in the nineteenth century has come either from them or from other Scotchmen, and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish origin, it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth of Scottish literature is as notable a historical phenomenon as the rise and growth of the Scottish philosophy. And considering, moreover, how lately Scotland has entered on this literary field, how little time she has had to display her powers, how recently she was in this respect savage, and how much of her savage vitality yet remains to be articulated in civilized books, may we not hope that her literary avatar is but beginning, and has a goodly course yet to run? From the Solway to Caithness we hear a loud Amen!

THEORIES OF POETRY."

THERE have been hundreds of disquisitions on poetry in all ages-long and short, good, bad, and indifferent; and now-adays, we cannot open a magazine or a review without finding something new said about our friend" The Poet," as distinguished from our other friend" The Prophet," and the like. But cant cannot be helped; and, if we are to abandon good phrases because they have been used a great many times, there is an end to all reviewing. Much, too, as has been spoken about poetry and poets, we doubt if the world, in its lucubrations on this subject, has got far beyond the antithesis suggested by what Aristotle said about it two thousand years ago, on the one hand, and what Bacon advanced two hundred and fifty years ago, on the other. At least, acquainted as we are with a good deal that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Goethe, and Leigh Hunt, and now Mr. Dallas, have written about poetry by way of more subtle and insinuating investigation, we still feel that the best notion of the thing, for any manageable purpose, is to be beaten out of the rough-hewn definitions of it, from opposite sides, supplied by Aristotle and Bacon. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes as follows:

"Epic poetry and the poetry of tragedy, as well as comedy and dithyrambic poetry, and most flute and lyre music, all are, in their nature, viewed generally, imitations (uphoeis); differing from each other, however, in three thingseither in that they imitate by different means, or in that they imitate different things, or in that they imitate differently and not in the same manner. For, as some artists, either from technical training or from mere habit, imitate various objects by colours and forms, and other artists by vocal sound; so, of the arts mentioned above, all effect their imitation by rhythm, and words and melody, employed either severally or in combination. For example, in flute and lyre music, and in any other kind of music having similar effect, such as pipe music, melody and rhythm are alone used. In the dance, again, the imitation is accomplished by rhythm by itself, without melody; there being dancers who, by means of rhythmical gesticulations, imitate even manners, passions, and acts. Lastly, epic poetry produces its imitations either by mere articulate words, or by metre superadded.

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW; August, 1853.-Poetics: an Essay on Poetry. By E. S. DALLAS. London, 1852.

Since, in the second place, those who imitate copy living characters, it behoves imitations either to be of serious and lofty, or of mean and trivial objects. The imitation must, in fact, either be of characters and actions better than they are found among ourselves, or worse, or much the same; just as, among painters, Polygnotus represented people better-looking than they were, Pauson worse-looking, and Dionysius exactly as they were. Now, it is evident that each of the arts above mentioned will have these differences, the difference arising from their imitating different things. In the dance, and in flute and lyre music, these diversities are visible; as also in word-imitations and simple metre. Homer, for example, really made men better than they are; Cleophon made them such as they are; whereas Hegemon, the first writer of parodies, and Nicochares, made them worse. So also in dithyrambics and lyrics, one might, with Timotheus and Philoxenus, imitate even Persians and Cyclopses. By this very difference, too, is tragedy distinguished from comedy. The one even now strives in its imitations to exhibit men better than they are, the other worse.... Still the third difference remains, namely, as to the manner or form of the imitation. For even though the means of imitation, and the things imitated, should be the same, there might be this difference, that the imitation might be made either in the form of a narration, (and that either through an alien narrator, as Homer does, or in one's own person without changing,) or by representing the imitators as all active and taking part. So that, though in one respect Homer and Sophocles would go together as imitators, as both having earnest subjects, in another Sophocles and Aristophanes would go together, as both imitating dramatically...... Two causes, both of them natural, seem to have operated together to originate the poetic art. The first is, that the tendency to imitate is innate in men from childhood, (the difference between man and other animals being that he is the most imitative of all, acquiring even his first lessons in knowledge through imitation,) and that all take pleasure in imitation. Moreover, in the second place, just as the tendency to imitate is natural to us, so also is the love of melody and of rhythm; and metre is evidently a variety of rhythm. Those, therefore, who from the first were most strongly inclined to these things by nature, proceeding by little and little, originated poetry out of their impromptu fancies. Poetry, thus originated, was broken into departments corresponding to the peculiar characters of its producers; the more serious imitating only beautiful actions and their issues, while the more thoughtless natures imitated mean incidents, inventing lampoons, as others had invented hymns and eulogies. Lefore Homer we have no poem of any kind to be mentioned; though, doubtless, many existed."

Such, as indicated in those sentences of the treatise which seem to be of most essential import, is the general doctrine of Aristotle as to the nature of Poetry. With this contrast Bacon's theory, as stated, cursorily but profoundly, in the following sentences from the Advancement of Learning :—

"The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of man's understanding, which is the seat of learning-History to his Memory; Poesy to his Imagination; and Philosophy to his Reason.. Poesy is a part of learning, in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which Nature hath severed, and sever that which Nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things. Pictoribus atque Poetis, &c. It (Poetry) is taken in two senses-in respect of words, or matter. In the first sense, it is but a character of style, and belongeth to the arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present; in the latter, it is, as hath been said, one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which