TO THE SAME

The Great Work described

Jan. 1821.

...  I have already the written materials and contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace or memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively bring with them of course (1) Characteristics of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, with a critical review of each play; together with a relative and comparative critique on the kind and degree of the merits and demerits of the dramatic works of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger.  The History of the English Drama; the accidental advantages it afforded to Shakespeare, without in the least detracting from the perfect originality or proper creation of the Shakespearian Drama; the contradistinction of the latter from the Greek Drama, and its still remaining uniqueness, with the causes of this, from the combined influences of Shakespeare himself, as man, poet, philosopher, and finally, by conjunction of all these, dramatic poet; and of the age, events, manners, and state of the English language.  This work, with every art of compression, amounts to three volumes of about five hundred pages each. (2) Philosophical Analysis of the Genius and Works of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with similar, but more compressed criticisms on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, and others, during the predominance of the Romantic Poetry.  In one large volume.  These two works will, I flatter myself, form a complete code of the principles of judgement and feeling applied to works of Taste; and not of Poetry only, but of Poesy in all its forms, Painting, Statuary, Music, &c., &c. (3) The History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to discover by its own Strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac.  Two volumes. (4) Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrine and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a candidate for Holy Orders, including advice on the Plan and Subjects of Preaching, proper to a Minister of the Established Church.

To the completion of these four works, I have literally nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so many scraps and sibylline leaves, including margins of books and blank pages, that, unfortunately, I must be my own scribe, and not done by myself, they will be all but lost; or perhaps (as has been too often the case already) furnish feathers for the caps of others; some for this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of detraction, to be let fly against the luckless bird from whom they had been plucked or moulted.

In addition to these—­of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest sense of the word, mainly rest—­that, by which I might,