“That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long,
  But stoop’d to truth, and moralised his song.”

He should have written “rose to truth.”  In my mind, the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth.  Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances.  What made Socrates the greatest of men?  His moral truth—­his ethics.  What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles?  His moral precepts.  And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood?  It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the “forests” that ever were “walked” for their “description,” and all the epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle.  The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, undisputedly even a finer poem than the AEneid.  Virgil knew this; he did not order them to be burnt.

  “The proper study of mankind is man.”

It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “imagination” and “invention,” the two commonest of qualities:  an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem.  If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence.  As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems.  What then has ruined it?  His ethics.  Pope has not this defect; his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious.

In speaking of artificial objects, I have omitted to touch upon one which I will now mention.  Cannon may be presumed to be as highly poetical as art can make her objects.  Mr. Bowles will, perhaps, tell me that this is because they resemble that grand natural article of sound in heaven, and simile upon earth—­thunder.  I shall be told triumphantly, that Milton made sad work with his artillery, when he armed his devils therewithal.  He did so; and this artificial object must have had much of the sublime to attract his attention for such a conflict.  He has made an absurd use of it; but the absurdity consists not in using cannon against the angels of God, but any material weapon.  The thunder of the clouds would have been as ridiculous and vain in the hands of the devils, as the “villanous saltpetre:”  the angels were as impervious to the one as to the other.  The thunderbolts become sublime in the hands of the Almighty not as such, but because he deigns to use them as a means of repelling the rebel spirits; but no one can attribute their defeat to this grand piece of natural electricity:  the Almighty willed, and they fell; his word would have been enough; and Milton is as absurd, (and, in fact, blasphemous,) in putting material lightnings into the hands of the Godhead, as in giving him hands at all.