of human faces and souls—a gallery all-embracing in its range, photographing the meanest as well as the highest, and revealing to us, under all the dazzle and glitter of a sumptuous feudal style, the instincts which all men have in common, the compensations which each owes to the other, and the fair world in which each has an equal and indisputable share. Simply to picture men "in their habits as they live," no matter under what motive, was the highest possible beneficence; and this, in the golden dawn of our poetry, was done inimitably, with a beauty of thought and a wealth of resource unknown to any poet that has appeared since. Such was the dawn of our poetry; and did ever dawn bid promise of a more glorious day?
But, alas! to the reddening of this fair promise succeeded no fulfilment. Just when light seemed fullest, time and season were miraculously altered, and a period arrived, an overclouding of the sun, a portentous darkness, wherein few could tell whether it was night or day.This darkness was of a vaporous nature, miasmic. It was a fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward; finally, after sucking up all that was most unwholesome from the soil of France, to fix itself on England, and breed in its direful shadow a race of monsters whose long line has not ceased from that to the present day.
Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all more or less characterized by affectation, foolishness, and moral blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their mistress's eyebrow, sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all
