rine
some moral or intellectual object in their verse. Milton calls Spenser
"our sage serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." In like manner, the Absalom and
Achitophel, the Hind and Panther of Dryden, the philosophic strain of
Pope, the immortal page of Milton, and the half-inspired numbers of the
Task, are all, in their various ways, attempts of poets to improve or
reform the world. Every species of poetry, indeed, has received fresh
lustre, and even taken a new place in Parnassian dignity, by a larger
infusion of moral sentiment into its numbers. The ancient ballad has
arisen to new dignity through the moral touches, we wish they had been
less rare, of a Scott; and the stanza of Spenser has acquired new
interest in the hands of Lord Byron, from the philosophical air which it
wears. Numbers without morals are the man without "the glory." We
sincerely wish that the moral tone of his Lordship's poem had been less
liable to exception.

His Lordship, we believe, is acquainted with ancient authors. Let him
turn to Quinctilian, and he will find a whole chapter to prove that a
great writer must be a good man. Let him go to Longinus, and he will
read that a man who would write sublimely, "must spare no labour to
educate his soul to grandeur, and impregnate it with great and generous
ideas"--that "the faculties of the soul will then grow stupid, their
spirit will be lost, and good sense and genius lie in ruins, when the
care and study of man is engaged about the mortal, the worthless part of
himself, and he has ceased to cultivate virtue, and polish his nobler
part, his soul." Or, if poetical authority alone will satisfy a poet,
let him learn from one of the finest of our modern poems:

"But of our souls the high-born loftier part,
Th' ethereal energies that touch the heart,
Conceptions ardent, laboring thought intense,
Creative fancy's wild magnificence,
And all the dread sublimities of song:
These, Virtue, these to thee alone belong:
Chill'd, by the breath of vice, their radiance dies,
And brightest burns when lighted at the skies:
Like vestal flames to purest bosoms given,
And kindled only by a ray from heaven."[K]

That the object of poetry, however, is not simply to instruct, but to
"instruct by _pleasing_," is too obvious to need a proof. However the
original object of measure and rhythm may have been to graft truth on
the memo