self-respect destroyed by being watched too closely by their masters. The true statesman, interpreting the wisest will, the best instinct of a people, uses the force delegated to him to constrain the nation in that direction. Our position is often the reverse of this. Our servants have understood and executed our sinister will, and the tardy criticism of our better judgment comes halting after. That it does come inevitably is our safety, and perhaps an adequate recompense for these evils, inseparable from our condition.
In literature also, the good of free criticism is not unmixed with evil. Our first misfortune is, that there is a reference to a standard from without, viz. from England. As the spirit that dictates this is, from many causes, unfair and depreciating, a natural consequence has been to cause all our own criticism to take the opposite ground, to over praise that which we felt to be undervalued, or invidiously regarded.
In the second place, although all original literature comes from and refers to the heart of the people, it cannot, except in a rude age, address itself to that people, except through a class capable of receiving it. If great works do not find such a class in their own age, they wait till time and their own influence create it. No one will pretend, that Shakspeare or Milton spoke to their age in the same sense they do to us. But Shakspeare and Milton lived in times that could be unconscious of their greatness. It could not be so now. Ours is a conscious age, and every man is made the most of. We believe a conscious greatness inseparable from a critical literature; and such, therefore, we look for in this country;—a literature and art based on thorough criticism, and thorough knowledge of what already exists in the world; in a word, on a higher culture.
