him up as he floated through oceans of hexameters. How we miss this happy consciousness of the impossibility of satiating a living audience, in Virgil, and all later epic poets! The rigid dramatic laws of the Greeks might easily become a magic inspiration to the poet, who was sure of a rapt audience during the performance of a drama, of which each of the three acts was a whole tragedy in itself.
It is the greater or less certainty of an audience, and the nature of that audience, which rule the forms of literature, and develope or suppress the powers of the poet. It is true, a great work is written for all time, and the artist will always feel that time is necessary to his true appreciation; but still it is the nature of his immediate audience that gives the form and shape to his efforts. In the first or Inventive epoch, a devout and popular audience will demand form as the medium through which thought has always been presented to them. In the second or Imitative, the audience is cultivated, and form is to them the luxury and ornament of literature. In the Critical, the form becomes subservient to the matter; the audience is neither to be enchanted by the beauty, nor charmed by the luxury, of literature; it is neither devout nor cultivated; it demands to be interested and informed. Literature is no longer the business of a festival, or the ornament of elegant culture: it is the thing of every day, and to be criticised by every-day rules. It is perceived that form is not necessary to the transmission of thought by books, and all those modes of writing are adopted where its fetters may be avoided; and whereas, in its origin, form was the means taken by the author to come into contact with his audience, it is now viewed as an obstacle between the writer and his readers. It is like the ceremonious full dress, whereby our ancestors thought to honor themselves and their guests, and to forward the purposes of social intercourse; but which their descendants have criticised out of existence, because it has become in our day a bar, instead of a gate, between man and man.
We have only to consider the almost imperceptible portion of written and printed works, that now make pretension to any stricter form than the facile novel or the flexible essay.
