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mansion that is extremely poetical and picturesque; and, as long as it can be rendered comfortably habitable, I should almost tremble to see it meddled with, during the present conflict of tastes and opinions. Some of his advisers are no doubt good architects, that might be of service; but many, I fear, are mere levellers, who, when they had once got to work with their mattocks on this venerable edifice, would never stop until they had brought it to the ground, and perhaps buried themselves among the ruins. All that I wish is, that John's present troubles may teach him more prudence in future. That he may cease to distress his mind about other people's affairs; that he may give up the fruitless attempt to promote the good of his neighbours, and the peace and happiness of the world, by dint of the cudgel; that he may remain quietly at home; gradually get his house into repair; cultivate his rich estate according to his fancy; husband his income-if he thinks proper; bring his unruly children into order—if he can; renew the jovial scenes of ancient prosperity; and long enjoy, on his paternal lands, a green, an honourable, and a merry old age.

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT

1784-1859

FICTION AND MATTER OF FACT

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'-SHAKESPEARE.

A PASSION for these two things is supposed to be incompatible. It is certainly not; and the supposition is founded on an ignorance of the nature of the human mind, and the very sympathies of the two strangers. Mathematical truth is not the only truth in the world. An unpoetical logician is not the only philosopher. Locke had no taste for fiction he thought Blackmore as great a genius as Homer; but this was a conclusion he could never have come to, if he had known his premises. Newton considered poetry as on a par with ' ingenious nonsense'; which was an error as great as if he had ranked himself with Tom D'Urfey, or made the apex of a triangle equal to the base of it. Newton has had good for evil returned him by a greater than himself'; for the eye of imagination sees farther than the glasses of astronomy. I should say that the poets had praised their scorner too much, illustrious as he is, if it were not delightful to see that there is at least one faculty in the world which knows how to do justice to all the rest. Of all the universal privileges of poetry, this is one of the most peculiar, and marks her for what she is. The mathematician, the schoolman, the wit, the statesman, and the

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soldier, may all be blind to the merits of poetry, and of one another; but the poet, by the privilege which he possesses of recognizing every species of truth, is aware of the merits of mathematics, of learning, of wit, of politics, and of generalship. He is great in his own art, and he is great in his appreciation of that of others. And this is most remarkable in proportion as he is a poetical poeta high lover of fiction. Milton brought the visible and the invisible together on the top of Fiesole', to pay homage to Galileo; and the Tuscan deserved it, for he had an insight into the world of imagination. I cannot but fancy the shade of Newton blushing to reflect that, among the many things which he professed to know not, poetry was omitted, of which he knew nothing. Great as he was, he indeed saw nothing in the face of nature but its lines and colours; not the lines and colours of passion and sentiment included, but only squares and their distances, and the anatomy of the rainbow. He thought the earth a glorious planet; he knew it better than any one else, in its connexion with other planets; and yet half the beauty of them all, that which sympathy bestows and imagination colours, was to him a blank. He took space to be the sensorium of the Deity (so noble a fancy could be struck out of the involuntary encounter between his intense sense of a mystery and the imagination he despised!) and yet this very fancy was but an escape from the horror of a vacuum, and a substitution of the mere consciousness of existence for the thoughts and images with which a poet would have accompanied it. He imagined the form of the house, and the presence of the builder; but the life and the variety, the

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paintings, the imagery, and the music,-the loves and the joys, the whole riches of the place, the whole riches in the distance, the creations heaped upon creation, and the particular as well as aggregate consciousness of all this in the great mind of whose presence he was conscious,-to all this his want of imagination rendered him insensible. The Fairy Queen was to him a trifle; the dreams of Shakespeare' ingenious nonsense But courts were something, and so were the fashions there. When the name of the Deity was mentioned, he took off his hat! 1

There are two worlds; the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imaginations. To be sensible of the truth of only one of these, is to know truth but by halves. Milton said, that he ' dared be known to think Spenser a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas'. He did not say than Plato or Pythagoras, who understood the two spheres within our reach. Both of these, and Milton himself, were as great lovers of physical and political truth as any men; but they knew that it was not all; they felt much beyond, and they

1 Sir Isaac Newton rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, because he could not reconcile it to his arithmetic. The French Prophets', not being cognizable by the mathematics, were very near having him for a proselyte. His strength and his weakness were hardly equal in this distinction: but one of them, at least, serves to show how more than conventional his understanding was inclined to be, when taken out of its only faculty; and I do not presume to think that any criticism of mine can be thought even invidious against it. I do not deny the sun, because I deny that the sun has a right to deny the universe. I am writing upon Matter of Fact now myself, and Matter of Fact will have me say what I do.

made experiments upon more. It is doubted by the critics, whether Chaucer's delight in the handling of fictions, or in the detection and scrutiny of a piece of truth, was the greater. Chaucer was a conscientious Reformer, which is a man who has a passion for truth; and so was Milton. So, in his way, was Ariosto himself, and indeed most great poets; part of the very perfection of their art, which is verisimilitude, being closely connected with their sense of truth in all things. But it is not necessary to be great, in order to possess a reasonable variety of perception. That nobody may despair of being able to indulge the two passions together, I can answer for them by my own experience. I can pass, with as much pleasure as ever, from the reading of one of Hume's Essays to that of the Arabian Nights, and vice versa ; and I think, the longer I live, the closer, if possible, will the union grow. The roads are found to approach nearer, in proportion as we advance upon either; and they both terminate in the same prospect.

I am far from meaning that there is nothing real in either road. The path of matter of fact is as solid as ever; but they who do not see the reality of the other, keep but a blind and prone beating upon their own surface. To drop the metaphor, matter of fact is our perception of the grosser and

1 It has done so. This Essay was written in the year 1824; and within the last few years I have had the pleasure of reading (besides poets) three different histories of Philosophy, histories of Rome and England, some of the philosophy of Hume himself, much of Abraham Tucker's, all the novels of Fielding and Smollett (including Gil Blas), Mr. Lane's Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, a heap of English Memoirs, and the whole of the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe.

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