All manners take a tincture from our own, Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE. What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down to be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield. There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of Warner resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent for deep thought or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate simplicity of his verse, had obtained for Poetry a brief respite from a school at once declamatory and powerless, and led her forth for a “Sunshine Holiday” into the village green and under the hawthorn shade. But, though the softer and meeker feelings had struggled into a partial and occasional vent, those which partook more of passion and of thought, the deep, the wild, the fervid, were still without “the music of a voice.” For the after century it was reserved to restore what we may be permitted to call the spirit of our national literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French mimickers of classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene for the pure well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy in the gorgeous and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest passion with a language as burning as its thought and rapid as its impulse. At that time reflection found its natural channel in metaphysical inquiry or political speculation; both valuable, perhaps, but neither profound. It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age, but not one in which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and watered even the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius could have embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the mines of a superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles; or the Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth “The motion of the spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought;” or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary mind [Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and irregular pile of verse, full of dim-lighted cells, and winding galleries, in which what treasures lie concealed! That was an age in which poetry took one path and contemplation another; those who were addicted to the latter pursued it in its orthodox roads; and many, whom Nature, perhaps intended for poets, the wizard Custom converted into speculators or critics.