Suppose we demolish all these graceful fallacies, and the poetry, also, in which they are embalmed. What a throng of splendid deeds, of heroic and beautiful figures—demigods, warriors, kings—bright women and brave men, moving in gorgeous panorama over the vast back-ground of antiquity—is extinguished in the darkness! The creations of the ancient poets and imaginative writers have filled up a space in the earlier ages of the world, which without them would be a blank and lost to the human mind, as much as the pre-Adamite chaos is. What a disinheritance it would be to take away the Iliad and Odyssey! to obliterate Hector, the kind-hearted and manly hero; and Priam with his mighty sorrows a suppliant for his dead son; and the warring Achilles— “Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer,” and the wandering Ulysses, seeing strange shores and cities, and the varying manners of men! Not alone would much be wanted in the want of these venerable works, but in the want of all that literature which they inspired and gave rise to in after time. The succeeding poets and dramatists of Greece and Rome drew light from Homer, as Milton’s stars did in their golden urns from the sun. They took his historic imaginations and characters as their models, and reproduced them in forms which the world will not willingly let die, and which it prizes nearly as much as the Institutes and Pandects of Justinian, or any thing else of that authentic and substantial kind. To come to our own familiar literature, the fictions of our insular or continental writers are as favorably and generally remembered as the historic facts of the English-speaking peoples. In our genial moments, when the mind desires to be refreshed or pleased it will revert, with an almost universal preference, to what is imaginary, or adorned with the graces of imaginative literature; and half the world regard with as much attention the men and women of Shakspeare and Scott as those of Hume and Prescott. And how intimately and lovingly we give our interest to the words and actions of these imaginary beings! What a world of thought and life is in the dramas of Shakspeare! There is the venerable Lear, driven out into the storm, and talking the finest philosophy to the wild elements, that so feelingly persuade him what he is; and Hamlet, so sententious in his antic disposition; the fair Ophelia, and the prosy old courtier, Polonius; and the immortal bed-presser, and huge hill of flesh—the greatest liar and the greatest favorite in the world; and Macbeth, with his terrible hags on the heath, and his more terrible wife; and Richard, wooing Lady Anne, or fighting desperately his last battle. Then there are the witty and adventurous Rosalind, and “The gentle lady wedded to the Moor;”