Isaac Disraeli

“ In a general survey of society, he contemplates on the court and the clergy, glancing through all the diversified ranks of the laity, not sparing the people themselves, as their awful reprover. It was a voice from the wilderness in the language of the people. The children of want and oppression had found their solitary advocate. The prelacy, dissolved in the luxuriousness of papal pomp, and a barbarous aristocracy, with their rapacious dependents, were mindless of the morals or the happiness of those human herds, whose heads were counted, but whose hearts they could never call their own. ”

“ In this seraphic mode of criticism, the poem becomes mythic, and the poet a myth; in the power of abstraction, these critics have passed beyond the regions of humanity. We soar with them into the immensity of space, and we tremble as if we stood alone in the universe; we have lost sight of nature, as we seem to have passed her human boundaries. The ancient divinity of poetry itself, even Homer, is absorbed in the Shakespearian myth; for Shakespeare, to snatch a feather from the fiery wing of Coleridge, is “the Spinosistic deity, an omnipresent creativeness.” ”

“ Sackville, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his Induction; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable; his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by those not versed in ancient lore. ”

“ How in an indifferent actor like Shakespeare was betrayed those latent dramatic faculties by which he was one day to be the delight of that stage which he could not tread, remains a secret which the poet has not told. But whether it was by accident or in some happy hour, we know not, that Shakespeare, in conning the manuscript of some wretched drama, felt the glorious impulse which prompted the pen to strike out whole passages, and to interpolate whole scenes; that moment was the obscure birth of his future genius. ”

“ Every poet was an original, more suo, mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass away! ”

“ Awakening his last energies with the juvenile passion of his early days, he pledged his life on a new adventure—it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy, for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its lustre was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary passions.
There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did not embrace. ”

“ An Anglo-Saxon poem has the appearance of a collection of short hints rather than poetical conceptions, curt and ejaculative: a paucity of objects yields but a paucity of emotions, too vague for detail, too abrupt for deep passion, too poor in fancy to scatter the imagery of poesy. The Anglo-Saxon betrays its confined and monotonous genius: we are in the first age of art, when pictures are but monochromes of a single colour. ”

“ Men who appear at certain eras of society, however they be lauded for what they have done, are still liable to be censured for not doing what they ought to have done. Patriarch of the printing-press! who to thy last and dying day withdrew not thy hand from thy work, it is hard that thou shouldst be amenable to a law which thy faculties were not adequate to comprehend; surely thou mayst triumph, thou simple man! amid the echoes of thy “Caxtonians” rejoicing over thy Gothic leaves—but the historian of the human mind is not the historian of typography. ”

“ Let us, however, be reminded, that he who wholly neglects the study of our ancient poets must submit to the loss of knowledge which a philosopher would value; the manners of the age, the modes of feeling, the stream of thought, the virgin fancies, and that position which the human character takes in distant ages—these will imbue his memory with the genius of his country and the eternal truth of authentic nature. No English poet should wholly resign these masses of vernacular poetry to the lone closet of the antiquary ”

“ All beginnings are obscure; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented for the future, till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which terminate in what at length becomes universally adopted.
Could the life, or what we have of late called the psychological history, of this poetic Earl of Surrey be now written, it would assuredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high passions, and romantic enthusiasm. Little is known, save a few public events; but the print of the footsteps shows their dimension. We trace the excellence, while we know but little of the person. ”

“ Shakespeare is a poet who is always now separated from other poets, and the only one, except Pope, whose thoughts are familiar to us as household words. His eulogy has exhausted the language of every class of enthusiasts, the learned and the unlearned, the profound and the fantastical. The writings of this greatest of dramatists are, as once were those of Homer, a Bible whence we receive those other revelations of man, and of all that concerns man. ”

“ What Wolsey was we know, but how he was known to his own times, and to the people, we can only gather from the private satirist; corrected by the passionless arbiter of another age, the satirist becomes the useful historian of the man.
The extraordinary combination in the genius of Skelton was that of two most opposite and potent faculties—the hyperbolical ludicrous masking the invective. He acts the character of a buffoon; he talks the language of drollery; he even mints a coinage of his own, to deepen the colours of his extravagance—and all this was for the people! ”

“ The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of genius—for such were many among 521 them—feels how precious are the slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence. However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity. ”

“ Spenser, the courtly spectator of the tilt, the pageant, and the masque—musing over the tome of old Gothic romances, and striking into the vein of fabling of Italian poesy, whose novelty had nearly supplanted the ancient classics—was at once Ariosto and Tasso and Ovid.
Spenser composed with great facility; incessant production seems to have been his true existence. His was one of those minds whose labour diffuses their delight, and whose delight provokes to labour. He seems always to be in earnest, and sometimes in haste, for he had much to work. ”

“ It is unquestionable that the Reformation began to diminish the veneration for the Latin language. Whether from the love of novelty, or rather by that transition to a new system of human affairs, the pedantry of ancient standing was giving way to the cultivation of a national tongue. A great revolution was fast approaching, which would give a new direction to the studies of the scholastic gentry, and introduce a new mode of addressing the people. It was a revolution alarming those who would have walled in public opinion by circumscribing all knowledge to a privileged class. ”

“ Milton might have been classed among the minor poets had he not lived to be old enough to become the most sublime. Let it be a source of consolation, if not of triumph, in a long studious life of true genius, to know that the imagination may not decline with the vigour of the frame which holds it; there has been no old age for many men of genius.
We must lament that at such an early period in our vernacular literature, we have to record that the two fathers of our poetry, congenial spirits as they were, too closely resembled most of their sons—in one of the most painful infirmities of genius. ”

“ I have judged by the strong peculiarity of Harvey’s style; one cannot long doubt of a portrait marked by such prominent features. Pedantic but energetic, thought pressed on thought, sparkling with imagery, mottled with learned allusions, and didactic with subtle criticism—this is our Gabriel! The prefacer describes the state of our bardling as that of “young birds that be nearly crept out of their nest, who, by little, first prove their tender wings before they make a greater flight. And yet our new poet flieth as a bird that in time shall be able to keep wing with the best.” ”

“ When learning was solely ecclesiastical and scholastical, there were no preceptors for mankind. The monastery and the university were far removed from the sympathies of daily life; all knowledge was out of the reach of the layman. It was then that the energies of men formed a course of practical pursuits, a system of education of their own. The singular institution of chivalry rose out of a combination of circumstances where, rudeness and luxury mingling together, the utmost refinement was found compatible with barbaric grandeur, and holy justice with generous power. ”

“ When we float along the stream of his melodious song, conscious only of its beauty, we do not often pause at elevations which raise the feeling of the sublime. Such daring visions, when they do rise on us, rather indicate the power of his genius than the habit of his mind. Our gentle Spenser was often satisfied with rivalling without surpassing his originals, which Milton and Gray ever did when they copied. It seems, therefore, unreasonable to assert that Spenser has combined the daring sternness of Dante with the wild fantasy of Goethe. ”

“ BACON.
In the age of Elizabeth, the English mind took its first bent; a new-born impulse in the nation everywhere was working out its religion, its legislation, and its literature. In every class of genius there existed nothing to copy; everything that was to be great was to find a beginning. Those maritime adventurers in this reign who sailed to discover new regions, and those heroes whose chivalric spirit was errant in the marshes of Holland, were not more enterprising than the creators of our peaceful literature. ”

“ A universal genius was best able to compose a universal history; statesman, soldier, and sage, in writing the “History of the World,” how often has Rawleigh become his own historiographer! He had been a pilgrim in many characters; and his philosophy had been exercised in very opposite spheres of human existence. A great commander by land and by sea, he was critical in all the arts of stratography, and delights to illustrate them on every occasion. ”

“ The poet must be judged by the habits of his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected with those external circumstances open to common observers. Of all the tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares, like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others, dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its bright creations. ”

“ In a vast and flourishing metropolis the individual in liberty and security passes among the countless waves of this ocean of men.
A metropolis thus rising from its contracted infancy, extending in growth, and diversified by new classes of society, presented many novelties in its crowded scenes; mutable manners, humorous personages, all the affectations or the homeliness of its citizens. Many writers, among whom were some of admirable genius, devoted their pens to fugitive objects and evanescent scenes, sure of finding an immediate reception from the sympathy of their readers. ”