hem affords
some means of insight into the morals and manners of the dumb people.

As for those which have utterance, they either speak freshly from day to
day, or they show their principles and temper by the choice they make
from among their own classics. Whatever is most accordant with their
sympathies, they dwell upon; so that the selection is a sure indication
of what the popular sympathies are. The same may be said of the
comparative popularity of modern books; but they may reveal only a
temporary state of feeling, and the traveller has to separate this
species of evidence from the more important kind which testifies to the
permanent affections and convictions of a people. The revelling of the
French in Voltaire, of the Germans in Werter, and of the English in
Byron, was, in each case, a highly important revelation of popular
feeling; but it is not a circumstance from which to judge of the fixed
national character of any of the three. It was a sign of the times, and
not signs of nations. Voltaire pulled down certain erections which could
not stand any longer, and was worshipped as a denier of untruths,--the
popular mind being then ripe for the exploding of errors. But here ended
the vocation of Voltaire. The French are now busy, to the extent of
their energy, in doing what ought to follow upon the exposure of
errors;--they are searching after truth. Pretences having been
destroyed, they are now propounding and trying principles; and works
which propose new and sounder erections find favour in preference to
such as only expose and ridicule old sins and mistakes.--Werter was
popular because it expressed the universal restlessness and discontent
under which not only Germany, but Europe was suffering. Multitudes found
their uncomfortable feelings uttered for them; and Werter was, in fact,
the groan of a continent. Old superstitions, tyrannies, and ignorance
were becoming intolerable, and no way was seen out of them; and the
voice of complaint was hailed with universal sympathy. So it was with
the poetry of Byron, adopted and echoed as it was, and will for some
time continue to be, by the sufferers under an aristocratic constitution
of society, whether they be oppressed by force from without, or by
weariness, satiety, and disgust from within. The permanent state of the
English mind is not represented in Byron, and could not be guessed at
from his writings, except by inference from the woes of a particular
order of minds