was of a later age, and not the worse for it)—­Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek sculptors and tragedians,—­all lived near the beginning of their arts —­perfected, and all but created them.  These giant-sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows; and the long line of their successors, in different ages, does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness.  In strength and stature they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty they have not been surpassed.  In after-ages, and more refined periods, (as they are called) great men have arisen, one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals; though in general the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope, among poets; Guido and Vandyke, among painters.  But in the earlier stages of the arts, as soon as the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language was sufficiently acquired, they rose by clusters, and in constellations, never so to rise again!

The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense around us—­with what we know, and see, and feel intimately.  They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature.  But the pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand, or three hundred years ago, as they are at present:  the face of nature, and “the human face divine” shone as bright then as they have ever done.  But it is their light, reflected by true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’ feet, like that which

               “Circled Una’s angel face,
      And made a sunshine in the shady place.”

The four greatest names in English poetry, are almost the four first we come to—­Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton.  There are no others that can really be put in competition with these.  The two last have had justice done them by the voice of common fame.  Their names are blazoned in the very firmament of reputation; while the two first (though “the fault has been more in their stars than in themselves that they are underlings”) either never emerged far above the horizon, or were too soon involved in the obscurity of time.  The three first of these are excluded from Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (Shakspeare indeed is so from the dramatic form of his compositions):  and the fourth, Milton, is admitted with a reluctant and churlish welcome.