most opposite to the flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his readers.  Dante’s only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.  He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror.  The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive:  but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness of the author’s mind.  Dante’s great power is in combining internal feelings with external objects.  Thus the gate of hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes.  This author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism.  In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, “I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth”:  and half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance.  All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader.  He affords few subjects for picture.  There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.

Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian.  He is a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers.  As Homer is the first vigour and lustihed, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry.  He lives only in the recollection and regret of the past.  There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country—­he is even without God in the world.  He converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionless and silent clouds.  The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter’s wind!  The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock-embrace, is