comes to them in a dress which the French have not authorized. Give others again the fancy, and in a piece professedly supernatural they will be content to overlook rules and probabilities; they go whithersoever the poet leads them, provided he does it with grace as well as imagination; and when they find themselves among summer clouds or enchanted gardens, do not quarrel with him for being out of London or Paris. Undoubtedly, that work is the noblest, which can produce the greatest quantity of fancies and probabilities at once, or in other words, the greatest pleasure under the greatest difficulty. A Mask, it is confessed, is not a great drama, nor an epic poem. But when the poet chuses to take leave of the probable, it does not follow that he must abandon the tasteful or even the natural, whatever has been the assertion of those, whose taste, if they could have found out the truth, was of as small a range as their imagination. Even the improbable has it's rules, and does not mistake mere exaggeration for greatness, the shocking for the terrific, or the puerile for the tricksome. In short, taste as well as fancy, has a very extensive province, even of the most legiti

mate kind; and the wildest imagination may be found there, and is, so long as it carries with it two things which may be called the poet's passports, and which our critical friends on the other side of the water would be in vain called upon to produce,-primitive feelings, and a natural language. Let the reader just look at a passage, almost a random one, from the Tempest. It is where Prospero tells Ariel to bring in some of the inferior spirits for the Mask.

Prospero. Ay, with a twink.

Ariel. Before you can say Come and Go,

And breathe twice, and cry So, so,

Each one tripping on his toe,

Will be here with mop and mowe.

Do you love me, Master? No.

Prospero. Dearly, my delicate Ariel.

Here are freaks of the fancy; but do they hinder the properest and most natural language, or even an appeal to the affections? The half-arch, half pathetic line in italics comes across our nature with a startling

smilingness, and finds us at home when we most seem to have gone out of ourselves.

It is observable, that in proportion as the critic possesses something of poetry himself, or the poet rises in the enthusiasm of his art, he gets above this kind of prejudice. What are styled "fooleries" by Warburton are called "liberal and elegant amusements" by Warton; and what were neglected by the wits of Charles the Second's day for French rhetoric, rhyming tragedies, and the conceits of the corrupted Italian school (for when writers talk of the conceits of the Italians, they are speaking of what the Italians themselves condemn) were praised and practised by the men, who, by universal consent, are at the head of our native poetry.

Had our great poets indeed stopped short of actual practice in this instance, it would be clear from a variety of passages in their works, what hold these gorgeous and fanciful exhibitions had taken on their minds. Pageant and Mask are common terms in

Shakspeare and Spenser for something more than ordinarily striking in the way of vision; they often furnish them with resemblances and reflections; and a great deal of the main feature of the Faerie Queen has with great probability been traced to the influence of these congenial spectacles. Milton, it is true, who objected to kings on earth and filled heaven with regalities,who denied music to chapel-goers and allowed it to angels,-who would have had nothing brilliant in human worship and sprinkled the pavement before the deity's throne with roses and amaranths,-has a passage in which he speaks contemptuously of

Court-amours,

Mix'd dance, or wanton Mask, or midnight ball; *

but it was after he had learnt to quarrel with the graces of the world, as something which Providence had sent us only to deny ourselves. He is speaking here too of the entertainment in it's abuse rather than it's pro

*Parad. Lost. Book v.

per character. In his younger, happier, and it may be added, not less poetical days, he counted

Mask and antique Pageantry

among the rational pleasures of cheerfulness, and gave them perhaps the very highest as well as most lovely character of abstract and essential poetry, by calling them

Such sights as youthful poets dream

On summer eves by haunted stream.*

In short, Comus had been the result of his early feelings; and it was curious, that he who inveighed against Masks in his more advanced age, should have been fated to leave to posterity the very piece by which this species of composition is chiefly known.

Comus, however, though an undoubted Mask in some

* L'Allegro.