"I know," continued Mr. Stanley, "that a Christian need not borrow weapons of attack or defense from the classic armory; but, to drop all metaphor, if he is called upon to defend truth and virtue against men whose minds are adorned with all that is elegant, strengthened with all that is powerful, and enriched with all that is persuasive, from the writers in question—is he likely to engage with due advantage if his own mind be destitute of the embellishments with which theirs abound? While wit and imagination are their favorite instruments, shall we consider the aid of either as useless, much less as sinful in their opponents?"
"While young men will be amused," said Sir John, "it is surely of importance that they should be safely amused. We should not therefore wish to obliterate in authors such faculties as wit and fancy, nor to extinguish a taste for them in readers."
"Show me any one instance of good that ever was effected by any one poet," said Mr. Tyrrel, "and I will give up the point; while, on the other hand, a thousand instances of mischief might be produced."
"The latter part of your assertion, sir," said I, "I fear is too true: but to what evil has elevation of fancy led Milton, or Milton his readers? Into what immoralities did it involve Spenser or Cowley? Has Thomson added to the crimes or the calamities of mankind? Into what immoralities did it plunge Gray, or Goldsmith? Has it tainted the purity of Beattie in his Minstrel, or that of the living minstrel of the Lay? What reader has Mason corrupted, or what reader has Cowper not benefitted? Milton was an enthusiast both in religion and politics. Many enthusiasts with whom he was connected, doubtless condemned the exercise of his imagination in his immortal poem as a crime; but his genius was too mighty to be restrained by opposition, and his imagination too vast and powerful to be kept down by a party. Had he confined himself to his prose writings, weighty and elaborate as some of them are, how little service would he have done the world, and how little would he now be read or quoted! In his life-time politics might blind his enemies, and fanaticism his friends. But now, who, comparatively, reads the Iconoclastes? who does not read Comus?"
"What then," said Mr. Tyrrel, "you would have our young men spend their time in reading idle verses, and our girls, I suppose, in reading loose romances?"
"It is to preserve both from evils which I deprecate," said Mr. Stanley, "that I would consign the most engaging subjects to the best hands, and raise the taste of our youth, by allowing a little of their leisure, and of their leisure only, to such amusements; and that chiefly with a view to disengage them from worse pursuits. It is not romance, but indolence; it is not poetry, but sensuality, which are the prevailing evils of the day—evils far more fatal in themselves, far more durable in their effects, than the perusal of works of wit and genius. Imagination will cool of itself. The effervescence of fancy will soon subside; but absorbing dissipation, but paralyzing idleness, but degrading self-love,
"Grows with their growth, and strengthens with their strength."
"A judicious reformer," said Sir John, "will accommodate his remedy to an existing and not an imaginary evil. When the old romances, the grand Cyruses, the Clelias, the Calprenedes, and the Cassandras, had turned all the young heads in Europe; or when the fury of knight-errantry demanded the powerful rein of Cervantes to check it—it was a duty to attempt to lower the public delirium. When, in our own age and country, Sterne wrote his corrupt, but too popular lesser work, he became the mischievous founder of the school of sentiment. A hundred writers communicated, a hundred thousand readers caught, the infection. Sentimentality was the disease which then required to be expelled. The reign of Sterne is past. Sensibility is discarded, and with it the softness which it must be confessed belonged to it. Romance is vanished, and with it the heroic, though somewhat unnatural, elevation which accompanied it. We have little to regret in the loss of either; nor have we much cause to rejoice in what we have gained by the exchange. A pervading and substantial selfishness, the striking characteristic of our day, is no great improvement on the wildness of the old romance, or the vapid puling of the sentimental school."
"Surely," said I (L'Almanac des Gourmands at that instant darting across my mind), "it is as honorable for a gentleman to excel in critical as in culinary skill. It is as noble to cultivate the intellectual taste, as that of the palate. It is at least as creditable to discuss the comparative merits of Sophocles and Shakspeare, as the rival ingredients of a soup or a sauce. I will even venture to affirm that it is as dignified an amusement to run a tilt in favor of Virgil or Tasso against their assailants, as to run a barouche against a score of rival barouches; and though I own that, in Gulliver's land of the Houyhnhnms, the keeping up the breed of horses might have been the nobler patriotism, yet in Great Britain it is hitherto, at least, no contemptible exertion of skill and industry 'to keep up the breed of gentlemen.'"