The distinct literary tastes of different nations, and the repugnance they mutually betray for the master-writers of each other, is an important circumstance to the philosophical observer.  These national tastes originate in modes of feeling, in customs, in idioms, and all the numerous associations prevalent among every people.  The reciprocal influence of manners on taste, and of taste on manners—­of government and religion on the literature of a people, and of their literature on the national character, with other congenial objects of inquiry, still require a more ample investigation.  Whoever attempts to reduce this diversity, and these strong contrasts of national tastes to one common standard, by forcing such dissimilar objects into comparative parallels, or by trying them by conventional principles and arbitrary regulations, will often condemn what in truth his mind is inadequate to comprehend, and the experience of his associations to combine.

These attempts have been the fertile source in literature of what may be called national prejudices.  The French nation insists that the northerns are defective in taste—­the taste, they tell us, which is established at Paris, and which existed at Athens:  the Gothic imagination of the north spurns at the timid copiers of the Latin classics, and interminable disputes prevail in their literature, as in their architecture and their painting.  Philosophy discovers a fact of which taste seems little conscious; it is, that genius varies with the soil, and produces a nationality of taste.  The feelings of mankind indeed have the same common source, but they must come to us through the medium and by the modifications of society.  Love is a universal passion, but the poetry of love in different nations is peculiar to each; for every great poet belongs to his country.  Petrarch, Lope de Vega, Racine, Shakspeare, and Sadi, would each express this universal passion by the most specific differences; and the style that would be condemned as unnatural by one people, might be habitual with another.  The concetti of the Italian, the figurative style of the Persian, the swelling grandeur of the Spaniard, the classical correctness of the French, are all modifications of genius, relatively true to each particular writer.  On national tastes critics are but wrestlers:  the Spaniard will still prefer his Lope de Vega to the French Racine, or the English his Shakspeare, as the Italian his Tasso and his Petrarch.  Hence all national writers are studied with enthusiasm by their own people, and their very peculiarities, offensive to others, with the natives constitute their excellences.  Nor does this perpetual contest about the great writers of other nations solely arise from an association of patriotic glory, but really because these great native writers have most strongly excited the sympathies and conformed to the habitual tastes of their own people.