n scarcely reproach the man of genius, who we shall find
is always reflecting back the feelings of his own nation, even in his most
original speculations.

In works of pure imagination we trace the same march of the human
intellect; and we discover in those inventions, which appear sealed by
their originality, how much has been derived from the age and the people
in which they were produced. Every work of genius is tinctured by the
feelings, and often originates in the events, of the times. The _Inferno_
of DANTE was caught from the popular superstitions of the age, and had
been preceded by the gross visions which the monks had forged, usually for
their own purposes. "La Citta dolente," and "la perduta gente," were
familiar to the imaginations of the people, by the monkish visions, and it
seems even by ocular illusions of Hell, exhibited in Mysteries, with
its gulfs of flame, and its mountains of ice, and the shrieks of the
condemned.[A] To produce the "Inferno" only required the giant step of
genius, in the sombre, the awful, and the fierce, DANTE. When the age of
chivalry flourished, all breathed of love and courtesy; the great man was
the great lover, and the great author the romancer. It was from his own
age that MILTON derived his greatest blemish--the introduction of
school-divinity into poetry. In a polemical age the poet, as well as the
sovereign, reflected the reigning tastes.

[Footnote A: Sismondi relates that the bed of the river Arno, at Florence,
was transformed into a representation of the Gulf of Hell, in the year
1304; and that all the variety of suffering that monkish imagination had
invented was apparently inflicted on real persons, whose shrieks and
groans gave fearful reality to the appalling scene.--ED.]

There are accidents to which genius is liable, and by which it is
frequently suppressed in a people. The establishment of the Inquisition in
Spain at one stroke annihilated all the genius of the country. Cervantes
said that the Inquisition had spoilt many of his most delightful
inventions; and unquestionably it silenced the wit and invention of a
nation whose proverbs attest they possessed them even to luxuriance. All
the continental nations have boasted great native painters and architects,
while these arts were long truly foreign to us. Theoretical critics, at a
loss to account for this singularity, accused not only our climate, but
even our diet, as the occult causes of our unfitness to cultiv