Poetry with the Barbarians is far more esteemed than with us, although in our annals are found evidences of its immemorial existence. As with us, it takes many forms, and is reduced to an art. The two greatest names are Milton and Shakespeare. The first of these is esteemed as the most sublime of all poets, ancient or modern--but it is needful to fix the quality, the essence of the sublime! Of the gloomy grandeur of the man, and of his power of suggesting the vast and the intangible, there can be no doubt. Nor is he wanting in a mournful sweetness--the plaint of a beneficent being who feels an eternal despair! Nor can it be otherwise, for the grand imagination of Milton is wholly occupied with the devils of the Barbarian Superstition! With its terrible images--with the Hell in which they and lost men for ever burn in eternal fires, and yet are never consumed! He introduces the reader (in his great Poem) to Paradise [Kar-din], where man once lived in perfect wisdom and happiness--and here the Poet is full of that sad, that tender, that inexpressible, sweet despair! From this Paradise (as said elsewhere) man was enticed by Satan, who had been set free from Hell for the very purpose; and then follow all the surprising pictures, vast, terrible, indescribable--only possible to a mind fully possessed by all the _horrors_ of the Jew Jah-god Idolatry. Shakespeare, with a healthier mind, one not distorted by the Superstition, and with a human, natural vigour and feeling, writes in a manner to interest man. On the whole, the English Barbarians place him far above all others of any time or place--call him the Divine Shakespeare! This is very easy with a people who know nothing of the poetry of the great East, nor of that of our Flowery Kingdom--in truth, have but a slight acquaintance with the writers of the other Barbarians!