sible, to a child-like faculty of extracting from each hour just the amount of happiness that it contains. With this lame and impotent conclusion the book practically ends, for all the remaining reflections do not avail to place in any clearer light the uncertain and colourless thought of the writer.
Her next work was that on Literature Considered in Relation to Social Institutions. Its object was to establish the continuous progress and ultimate perfectibility of the human mind, and the happy influence exercised by liberty upon literature.
The theory of the authoress was that the progress of philosophy, i.e. thought, had been gradual, while that of poetry had been spasmodic.
Art, indeed, offering, by its early maturity, an awkward contradiction to her system, she proceeded to get rid of it by describing it as the product of imagination rather than of thought, and by adding that its plastic and sensuous qualities rendered it capable of flourishing under systems of government which necessarily crush every other form of intellectual activity. To prove the perfectibility of the human mind, she then had but poetry and philosophy. To the latter she assigned the really glorious future, while the former she regarded as finished. She was the first of the Romanticists, in the sense that she preferred the poetry of the north to that of the south; and her predilections in this line carried her so far, that she placed Ossian above Homer. She considered that the early forms of poetry—in other words, mere transcripts of material impressions—were superior to those later creations in which sentiment enters as an element. And this idea, which seems at first a contradiction to her theory of perfectibility, was really intended to
