will find an answering response in a sex which has always enough old women of its own.

The poets who thus snivel in rhyme generally labor under the hallucination that their mawkish foolery finds sympathizing hearers. Bound up and circumscribed by their own petty world of consciousness, and brooding over their own little sorrows and cares, they are incapable of giving any free and fresh expression to natural thought and emotion. They hug the phantom of their conceit close to their breasts, and deem it of universal interest and love. Everything which occurs to themselves, from a pain in the heart to a pain in the head, they deem worthy of commemoration in metre. Their idiosyncrasies, follies, maladies, moonshine, and misery, are never satisfied until they have been tortured into rhyme. The public take interest in the psychological history of great poets, because those poets have earned their title to such distinction by works of great genius, in which all can sympathize. Shakspeare's sonnets are invaluable, because we desire to know everything which can be learned of the author of Hamlet and Macbeth. But the class of metrical snivellers would reverse this, and have the world's curiosity excited for the mental diseases of complaining mediocrity. All the "decent drapery" that decorum casts over those private meditations which every healthy intellect dislikes to divulge, they throw off with the utmost carelessness, and glory in an indelicate exposure of mind. Every little event of their mental or bodily life they deem worthy of being celebrated in a poem. If a thought happens accidentally to stray into their craniums, they rush instantly into rhyme. A sonnet to them is a soothing-syrup, and lyrics flow from their lamentations. They would turn

their whine into a warble. They mistake their mental diseases for general laws. They would re-construct life after the image of their own sick imaginations, and make a nation of snivellers. An inelegant imbecility, like the mingling of moonbeams with fog, drearily illumines the intense inane of their rhetoric.

When we consider the importance of energy and hope in the affairs of the world, and contemplate the enfeebling if not immoral result of indulging in a dainty and debilitating egotism, we cannot but look upon the snivellers of social life as great evils. Even when the habit of selfish lamentation is accompanied by talent, it should be treated with contempt and scorn. There are so many inducements in our time to pamper it, that there is no danger that the opposition will be too severe. Whithersoever we go, we meet with the sniveller. He stops us at the corner of the street to intrust us with his opinion on the probability that the last measure of Congress will dissolve the Union. He fears, also, that the morals and intelligence of the people are destroyed by the election of some rogue to office. He tells us, just before church, that the last sermon of some transcendental preacher has given the death-blow to religion, and that the waves of atheism and the clouds of pantheism are to deluge and darken all the land. Next he informs us of the starvation of some poor hack, engaged as assistant editor to a country journal, and infers from it that, in the United States, literature cannot flourish. In a time of general health, he speaks of the pestilence that is to be. The mail cannot be an hour late but he prattles of railroad accidents and steamboat disasters. He fears that his friend who was married yesterday will be a bankrupt in a year, and whimpers over the trials which he

will then endure. He is ridden with an eternal nightmare, and emits an eternal wail.

Recklessness is a bad quality, and so is blind and extravagant hope; but neither is so degrading as inglorious and inactive despair. We object to the sniveller, because he presents the anomaly of a being who has the power of motion without possessing life. His insipid languor is worse than tumid strength. Better that a man should rant than whine. The person who has no bounding and buoyant feelings in him, whose cheek never flushes at anticipated good, whose blood never tingles and fires at the contemplation of a noble aim, who has no aspiration and no great object in life, is only fit for the hospital or the band-box. Enterprise, confidence, a disposition to believe that good can be done, an indisposition to believe that all good has been done - these constitute important elements in the character of every man who is of use to the world. We want no wailing and whimpering about the absence of happiness, but a sturdy determination to abate misery. The world should have too much work on its hands to lend its ear to the plaints of its individual members. The laborers should have no mercy for the do-nothings. The man of serious purpose has no time to be miserable. Into the very blood and brain of our youth there should be infused energy and power. The literature of the country should breathe the bracing air of a healthy inspiration, not the hot atmosphere of a spurious spiritualism and silly sentimentality. Instead of brooding over his own diseased consciousness, and aggravating the malady which enfeebles his mind, the jaded blasé should cure his unhappiness by ministering to the comfort of others. And we would say to the poor sniveller, whether he dawdles in a drawing-room or

tottles in a tavern, in the words of the sagacious Herr Teufelsdröckh, "Produce! produce! were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name!

'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee;

out with it, then. Up, up! whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work, while it is called to-day, for the night cometh wherein no man can work."

BRITISH CRITICS.*

THE British reviews and reviewers of the early part of the present century are closely connected with the history of English literature, not only on account of the influence they exerted on public opinion, but for the valuable contributions which a few of them made to literature itself. Some of the most masterly disquisitions in the whole range of English letters have appeared in the three leading periodicals of the time, - the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine. Almost all systems of philosophy, theology, politics and criticism, have been vehemently discussed in their pages. They have been the organs through which many of the subtlest and strongest intellects have communicated with their age. In classifying historical events under ideas and principles, in tracing out the laws which give pertinence to seemingly confused facts, in presenting intellectual and historical epochs in vivid pictures, they have been especially successful. But

1. Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. By Francis Jeffrey, now one of the Judges of the Court of Sessions in Scotland. London: Longman & Co. 4 vols. 8vo.

2. Wiley & Putnam's Library of Choice Reading: Characters of Shakspeare. By William Hazlitt. New York. 16mo.

3. Imagination and Fancy. By Leigh Hunt. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 16mo. - North American Review, October, 1845.