to find your way back again to
the spot where you unluckily got in; not so, however, with the Fairy
Queen. Beautiful it is indeed, most exquisitely and unapproachably
beautiful in many passages, especially about ladies and ladies' love
more than celestial, for Venus loses in comparison her lustre in the
sky; but still people were afraid to get into it then as now; and
"heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb," lay buried in dust. As
to Shakspeare, we cannot find many traces of him in the domestic
occupations of the English gentry during the times alluded to; nor do we
believe that the character of Hamlet was at all relished in their halls,
though perhaps an occasional squire chuckled at the humours of Sir John
Falstaff. We have Mr. Wordsworth's authority for believing that Paradise
Lost was a dead letter, and John Milton virtually anonymous. We need say
no more. Books like these, huge heavy vols. lay with other lumber in the
garrets and libraries. As yet, Periodical Literature was not; and the
art of printing seems long to have preceded the art of reading. It did
not occur to those generations that books were intended to be read by
people in general, but only by the select few. Whereas now, reading is
not only one of the luxuries, but absolutely one of the necessaries of
life, and we now no more think of going without our book than without
our breakfast; lunch consists now of veal-pies and Venetian
Bracelets--we still dine on Roast-beef, but with it, instead of
Yorkshire pudding, a Scotch novel--Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore
sweeten tea for us--and in "Course of Time" we sup on a Welsh rabbit
and a Religious Poem.

We have not time--how can we?--to trace the history of the great
revolution. But a great revolution there has been, from nobody's reading
anything, to every body's reading all things; and perhaps it began with
that good old proser Richardson, the father of Pamela, Clarissa, and
Sir Charles Grandison. He seems to have been a sort of idiot, who had
a strange insight into some parts of human nature, and a tolerable
acquaintance with most parts of speech. He set the public a-reading, and
Fielding and Smollett shoved her on--till the Minerva Press took her in
hand--and then--the Periodicals. But such Periodicals! The Gentleman's
Magazine--God bless it then, now, and for ever!--the Monthly Review,
the Critical and the British Critic! The age had been for some years
literary, and was now fast becoming periodical.