misanthropy was exhibited.  I cannot, however, think that there was anything either in the nature of his pastimes, or his studies, unfavourable to the formation of the poetical character.  His amusements were active; his reading, though without method, was yet congenial to his impassioned imagination; and the phantom of an enthusiastic attachment, of which Miss Chaworth was not the only object (for it was altogether intellectual, and shared with others), were circumstances calculated to open various sources of reflection, and to concentrate the elements of an energetic and original mind.

But it is no easy matter to sketch what may have been the outline of a young poet’s education.  The supposition that poets must be dreamers, because there is often much dreaminess in poesy, is a mere hypothesis.  Of all the professors of metaphysical discernment, poets require the finest tact; and contemplation is with them a sign of inward abstract reflection, more than of any process of mind by which resemblance is traced, and associations awakened.  There is no account of any great poet, whose genius was of that dreamy cartilaginous kind, which hath its being in haze, and draws its nourishment from lights and shadows; which ponders over the mysteries of trees, and interprets the oracles of babbling waters.  They have all been men—­worldly men, different only from others in reasoning more by feeling than induction.  Directed by impulse, in a greater degree than other men, poets are apt to be betrayed into actions which make them singular, as compared by those who are less imaginative; but the effects of earnestness should never be confounded with the qualities of talent.

No greater misconception has ever been obtruded upon the world as philosophic criticism, than the theory of poets being the offspring of “capering lambkins and cooing doves”; for they differ in no respect from other men of high endowment, but in the single circumstance of the objects to which their taste is attracted.  The most vigorous poets, those who have influenced longest and are most quoted, have indeed been all men of great shrewdness of remark, and anything but your chin-on-hand contemplators.  To adduce many instances is unnecessary.  Are there any symptoms of the gelatinous character of the effusions of the Lakers in the compositions of Homer?  The London Gazette does not tell us things more like facts than the narratives of Homer, and it often states facts that are much more like fictions than his most poetical inventions.  So much is this the case with the works of all the higher poets, that as they recede from that worldly standard which is found in the Epics of Homer, they sink in the scale of poets.  In what does the inferiority of Virgil, for example, consist, but in his having hatched fancies in his contemplations which the calm mind rejects as absurdities.  Then Tasso, with his enchanted forests and his other improbabilities; are they more