lie buried under the brick and
mortar tombs of four or five folios, which, on a moderate calculation,
might now be "wire-woven" into thirty or forty modern octavos.

In Charles I.'s time, love and honour were heightened by the wits into
florid romance; but Lord Goring turned all into ridicule; and he was
followed by the Duke of Buckingham, whose happy vein of ridicule was
favoured by Charles II., who gave it the vogue it obtained.

Sir William Temple justly observes, that changes in veins of wit are
like those of habits, or other modes. On the return of Charles II., none
were more out of fashion among the new courtiers than the old Earl of
Norwich, who was esteemed the greatest wit, in his father's time, among
the old.

Modern times have abounded with what may be called fashionable
literature. Tragedies were some years ago as fashionable as comedies are
at this day;[29] Thomson, Mallet, Francis, Hill, applied their genius to
a department in which they lost it all. Declamation and rant, and
over-refined language, were preferred to the fable, the manners, and to
nature--and these now sleep on our shelves! Then too we had a family of
paupers in the parish of poetry, in "Imitations of Spenser." Not many
years ago, Churchill was the occasion of deluging the town with
_political poems in quarto_.--These again were succeeded by _narrative
poems_, in the ballad measure, from all sizes of poets.--The Castle of
Otranto was the father of that marvellous, which once over-stocked the
circulating library and closed with Mrs. Radcliffe.--Lord Byron has been
the father of hundreds of graceless sons!--Travels and voyages have long
been a class of literature so fashionable, that we begin to prepare for,
or to dread, the arrival of certain persons from the Continent!

Different times, then, are regulated by different tastes. What makes a
strong impression on the public at one time, ceases to interest it at
another; an author who sacrifices to the prevailing humours of his day
has but little chance of being esteemed by posterity; and every age of
modern literature might, perhaps, admit of a new classification, by
dividing it into its periods of _fashionable literature_.

THE PANTOMIMICAL CHARACTERS.

Il est des gens de qui l'esprit guinde
Sous un front jamais deride
Ne souffre, n'approuve, et n'estime
Que le pompeux, et le sublime;
Pour moi j'ose poser en fait
Qu'en de certain