t the feverish mediocrity of overwrought brains becomes
infectious among the class who place themselves in too constant and
unbroken connection with it, and that from the closets of over-toiled
_litterateurs_ an excited superficiality creeps out upon the age. And
hence the necessity to which we have oftener than once referred, that
men should keep themselves in wholesome connection with the master
minds of the past. Mr. Smibert's remarks preface, as we have said, a
volume of sweet and tasteful verse; and we find him saying that, 'most
of all, the operation of Periodicalism has been unfavourably felt in
the domain of poetry.'

'The position of literature,' he adds, 'in the times of the
Wordsworths, Crabbes, and Campbells of the age just gone by, was more
favourable than at present to the devotion of talent to great
undertakings. These men were assuredly not beset by the same seductive
facilities as the _litterateurs_ of the current generation for
expending their powers on petty objects,--facilities all the more
fascinating, as comprising the pleasures of immediate publicity, and
perhaps even of repute for a day, if not also of some direct
remuneration. These influences of full-grown Periodicalism extend now
to all who can read and write. But it entices most especially within
its vortex those who exhibit an unusually large share of early
literary promise, involves them in multitudinous and multifarious
occupation, and, in short, divides and subdivides the operations of
talent, until all prominent identity is destroyed, both in works and
workers. To the growth of this modern system, beyond question, is
largely to be referred the comparative disappearance from among us of
great literary individualities; or, to use other and more accurate
words, by that system have men of capacity been chiefly diverted from
the composition of great individual works, and more particularly great
poems.'

We are less sure of the justice of this remark of Mr. Smibert's,
than of that of many of the others. It is not easy, we have said, to
smother a true poet; and we know that in the present age very
genuine poetry has been produced in the offices of very busy
newspaper editors. Poor Robert Nicoll never wrote truer poetry than
when he produced his 'Puir Folk' and his 'Saxon Chapel,' at a time
when he was toiling, as even modern journalist has rarely toiled, for
the columns of the _Leeds Times_; and James Montgomery produced his
'World before th