Many of the Odes of Horace had a patriotic subject--his Epistles and Satires, with those of Juvenal and Persius, were the sermons of the day. Virgil chiefly proposed to himself to exalt in his hero the character of a patriot, and, in his fictitious history, the dignity of his country. If the lessons they taught were of small importance or doubtful value, or if they often forget to "teach" in their ambition to "please," this is to be charged rather on the age than on the poet. They taught the best lessons they knew; and were satisfied to please only when they had nothing better to do. In modern times, it will not be questioned that the greatest poets have ever endeavoured to enshrine some moral or intellectual object in their verse. Milton calls Spenser "our sage serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." In like manner, the Absalom and Achitophel, the Hind and Panther of Dryden, the philosophic strain of Pope, the immortal page of Milton, and the half-inspired numbers of the Task, are all, in their various ways, attempts of poets to improve or reform the world. Every species of poetry, indeed, has received fresh lustre, and even taken a new place in Parnassian dignity, by a larger infusion of moral sentiment into its numbers. The ancient ballad has arisen to new dignity through the moral touches, we wish they had been less rare, of a Scott; and the stanza of Spenser has acquired new interest in the hands of Lord Byron, from the philosophical air which it wears. Numbers without morals are the man without "the glory." We sincerely wish that the moral tone of his Lordship's poem had been less liable to exception. His Lordship, we believe, is acquainted with ancient authors. Let him turn to Quinctilian, and he will find a whole chapter to prove that a great writer must be a good man. Let him go to Longinus, and he will read that a man who would write sublimely, "must spare no labour to educate his soul to grandeur, and impregnate it with great and generous ideas"--that "the faculties of the soul will then grow stupid, their spirit will be lost, and good sense and genius lie in ruins, when the care and study of man is engaged about the mortal, the worthless part of himself, and he has ceased to cultivate virtue, and polish his nobler part, his soul." Or, if poetical authority alone will satisfy a poet, let him learn from one of the finest of our modern poems: "But of our souls the high-born loftier part, Th' ethereal energies that touch the heart, Conceptions ardent, laboring thought intense, Creative fancy's wild magnificence, And all the dread sublimities of song: These, Virtue, these to thee alone belong: Chill'd, by the breath of vice, their radiance dies, And brightest burns when lighted at the skies: Like vestal flames to purest bosoms given, And kindled only by a ray from heaven."[K]