d take a volume of no ordinary
size, however laconically the sense were expressed, if it were meant to
instance the effects, and unfold all the causes, of this disposition upon
the moral, intellectual, and even physical character of a people, with its
influences on domestic life and individual deportment. A good document
upon this subject would be the history of Paris society and of French,
that is, Parisian, literature from the commencement of the latter half of
the reign of Louis XIV. to that of Buonaparte, compared with the preceding
philosophy and poetry even of Frenchmen themselves.

The second form, or more properly, perhaps, another distinct cause, of
this diseased disposition is matter of exultation to the philanthropist
and philosopher, and of regret to the poet, the painter, and the statuary
alone, and to them only as poets, painters, and statuaries;--namely, the
security, the comparative equability, and ever increasing sameness of
human life. Men are now so seldom thrown into wild circumstances, and
violences of excitement, that the language of such states, the laws of
association of feeling with thought, the starts and strange far-flights of
the assimilative power on the slightest and least obvious likeness
presented by thoughts, words, or objects,--these are all judged of by
authority, not by actual experience,--by what men have been accustomed to
regard as symbols of these states, and not the natural symbols, or
self-manifestations of them.

Even so it is in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound
_sun_, or the figures _s_, _u_, _n_, are purely arbitrary modes of
recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only
sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness _per
se_. But the language of nature is a subordinate _Logos_, that was in the
beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing it
represented.

Now the language of Shakespeare, in his _Lear_ for instance, is a
something intermediate between these two; or rather it is the former
blended with the latter,--the arbitrary, not merely recalling the cold
notion of the thing, but expressing the reality of it, and, as arbitrary
language is an heir-loom of the human race, being itself a part of that
which it manifests. What shall I deduce from the preceding positions? Even
this,--the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the
theatre, if only the actors were what we kn