The poet Gray held that in a neglected country churchyard, appropriated to only the nameless dead, there might lie, notwithstanding, the remains of undeveloped Miltons, Hampdens, and Cromwells,––men who, in more favourable circumstances, would have become famous as poets, or great as patriots or statesmen; and the stanzas in which he has embodied the reflection are perhaps the most popular in the language. One-half the thought is, we doubt not, just. Save for the madness of Charles, Cromwell would have died a devout farmer, and Hampden a most respectable country gentleman, who would have been gratefully remembered for half an age over half a county, and then consigned to forgetfulness. But the poets rarely die, however disadvantageously placed, without giving some sign. Rob Don, the Sutherlandshire bard, owed much less to nature than Milton did, and so little to learning that he could neither read nor write; and yet his better songs promise to live as long as the Gaelic language. And though both Burns and Shakespeare had very considerable disadvantages to struggle against, we know that neither of them remained ‘mute’ or ‘inglorious,’ or even less extensively known than Milton himself. It is, we believe, no easy matter to smother a true poet. The versifiers, placed in obscure and humble circumstances, who for a time complain of neglected merit and untoward fate, and then give up verse-making in despair, are always men who, with all their querulousness, have at least one cause of complaint more 207 than they ever seem to be aware of,––a cause of complaint against the nature that failed to impart to them ‘the divine vision and faculty.’ There are powers, however, admirably fitted to tell with effect in the literature of the country, for they have served to produce the most influential works which the world ever saw––works such as the Essay of Locke, the Peace and War of Grotius, and the Spirit of Laws of Montesquieu––which, with all their apparent robustness, are greatly less hardy than the poetic faculty, and which, unless the circumstances favourable to their development and exercise be present, fail to leave behind them any adequate record of their existence. It is difficult to imagine a situation in life in which Burns would not have written his songs, but very easy to imagine situations in which Robertson would not have produced his Scotland or his Charles V., nor Adam Smith his Wealth of Nations. We have no faith whatever in ‘mute, inglorious Miltons;’ but we do hold that there may be obscure country churchyards in which untaught Humes, guiltless of the Essay on Miracles, may repose, and undeveloped Bentleys and Warburtons, whose great aptitude for acquiring or capacity for retaining knowledge remained throughout life a mere ungratified thirst.

It has remained for the present age to throw one bar more in the way of able men of this special class than our fathers ever dreamed of; and this, curiously enough, just by giving them an opportunity of writing much, and of thinking incessantly. It is not, it would seem, by being born among ploughmen and mechanics, and destined to live by tilling the soil, or by making shoes or hobnails, that the ‘genial current of the soil is frozen,’ and superior talents prevented from accomplishing their proper work: it is by being connected with some cheap weekly periodical, or twice or thrice a week newspaper, and compelled to scribble on almost without pause or intermission for daily bread. 208 We have been led to think of this matter by an interesting little volume of poems, chiefly lyrical, which has just issued from the Edinburgh press,––the production of Mr. Thomas Smibert, a man who has lived for many years by his pen, and who introduces the volume by a prefatory essay, interesting from the glimpse which it gives of the literary disadvantages with which the professionally literary man who writes for the periodicals has to contend. Periodical literature is, he remarks, ‘to all intents and purposes a creation of the nineteenth century, in its principal existing phases, from Quarterly Reviews to Weekly Penny Magazines. Newspapers,’ he adds, ‘may justly be accounted the growth of the same recent era, the few previously published having been scarcely more than mere Gazettes, recording less opinions than bare public and business facts.’ The number of both classes of periodicals is now immensely great; and ‘equally vast, of necessity, is the amount of literary talent statedly and unremittingly engaged on these journals, while a large additional amount of similar talent finds in them occasional and ready outlets for its working.’ ‘When one or two leading Reviews, Quarterlies, and Monthlies alone existed, they called for no insignificant individual efforts of mind on the part of their chief conductors and supporters, and those parties almost took rank with the authors of single works of importance. But within the last twenty years periodical literature has become extensively hebdomadal, and even diurnal; and, as a necessary consequence, the essays of those sustaining it in this shape have decreased in proportionate value, at once from the larger amount of work demanded, and from the shorter time allowed for its execution. Such essays may serve the hour fairly, but can seldom be of high worth ultroneously.’ ‘The extent and variety of the labours called for at the hands of those actively engaged on modern cheap periodicals can scarcely be conceived by the uninitiated public. If their eyes were 209 opened on the subject, they would certainly wonder less why it is that the literary talent of the current generation does not tend to display itself by striking isolated efforts: they would also more readily understand wherefore parties in the situation of the present writer may well experience some unsatisfactory feelings in looking back on the labours of the past. Though years spent in respectable periodical writing can by no means be termed misspent, yet such a career presents in the retrospect but a multitude of disconnected essays on all conceivable themes, and such as too often prove their hurried composition by crudeness and imperfections.’ The consideration of such a state of things ‘may furnish a salutary lesson to the many among the young at this day, who, possessing some literary taste, imagine that the engagements of common life alone stand in the way of its successful development, and that to be enabled to pursue a life of professional writing in any shape would secure to them both fame and fortune to the height of their desires. They here err sadly. No doubt supereminent talents will sooner or later make themselves felt under almost any circumstances; but the position described assuredly offers no peculiar advantages for the furtherance of that end. Ebenezer Elliot, leaving his forge at eve with a wearied body, could yet bring to his favourite leisure tasks a mind less jaded than that of the littÉrateur by profession.’ ‘The regular periodicalist, too, of the modern class has usually no more stable interest in his compositions than has the counting-house clerk in the cash-books which he keeps. To publishers and conductors fall the lasting fruits. Let those among the young who feel the ambition to seek fame and fortune in the walks of literature think well of these things, and, above all, ponder seriously ere they quit, with such views, any fixed occupation of another kind.’

There is certainly food for thought here; and that, too, thought of a kind in which the public has a direct interest. 210 If such be the dissipating effect of writing for newspapers and the lighter periodicals, it is surely natural to infer that the exclusive reading of such works must have a dissipating effect also. It is too obvious that 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 littÉrateurs 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 littÉrateurs 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 211 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 the Flood,’ ‘Greenland,’ and ‘The Pelican Island,’ with many a sweet lyric of still higher merit, when laboriously editing the Sheffield Iris. The ‘Salamandrine’ of Mr. Charles Mackay was written when he was conducting the sub-editorial department of a daily London paper; nor did he ever write anything superior to it. And we question whether Mr. Smibert himself, though he might have produced longer poems, would have written better ones than some of those contained in the present volume, even had his life been one of unbroken leisure. It seems natural to literary men, who fail in realizing their own conceptions of what they had wished and hoped to perform, to cast the blame upon their circumstances. Johnson could speak as feelingly, not much later than the middle of the last century, of the ‘dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer,’ as any literary man of the present time, who, while solicitously desirous to give himself wholly to the muses, is compelled to labour as a periodicalist for the wants of the day that is passing over him. But perhaps the best solace for the dissatisfaction which would thus wreak itself on mere circumstances, is that which Johnson himself supplies. ‘To reach below his own aim,’ says the moralist, ‘is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied 212 with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little.’ But to labour and be forgotten is the common lot; and why should a literary man be more disposed to repine because his productions perish after serving a temporary purpose, than the gardener or farmer, whose vocation it is to supply the people with their daily food? If the provisions furnished, whether for mind or body, be wholesome, and if they serve their purpose, the producers must learn to be content, even should they serve the purpose only once, and but for a day. The danger of over-cropping, and of consequent exhaustion, is, of course, another and more serious matter; and of this the mind of the periodicalist is at least as much in danger as either field or garden when unskilfully wrought. But mere rest, which in course of time restores the exhausted earth, is often not equally efficient in restoring the exhausted mind; nor does mere rest, even were it a specific in the case, lie within the reach of the periodic writer. It is often the luxury for which he pants, but which he cannot command. One of the surest specifics in the case is, the specific of working just a little more,––of working for the work’s sake, whether at poem or history, or in the prosecution of some science, or in some antiquarian pursuit. There is an exquisite passage in one of the essays of Washington Irving, in which he compares the great authors––Shakespeare, for instance––who seem proof against the mutability of language, to ‘gigantic trees, that we see sometimes on the banks of a stream, which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighbouring plant to perpetuity.’ And such is the service rendered by some pervading pursuit of an intellectual character, prosecuted for its own sake, to the intellect of the journalist. It is 213 the necessity imposed upon him of taking up subject after subject in the desultory, disconnected form in which they chance to arise, and then, after throwing together a few hastily collected thoughts upon each, of dismissing them from his mind, that induces first a habit of superficiality, and finally leaves him exhausted; and the counteractive course open to him is just to take up some subject on which the thinking of to-day may assist him in the thinking of to-morrow, and on which he may be as well informed and profound as his native capacity permits. All our really superior newspaper editors have pursued this course––more, however, we are disposed to think, from the bent of their nature than from the necessities of their profession; and the poetical volume of Mr. Smibert shows that he too has his engrossing pursuit. We recommend his little work to our readers, as one in which they will find much to interest and amuse. We have left ourselves little room for quotation; but the following stanzas, striking, both from their beauty and from the curious fact which they embody, may be regarded as no unfair specimen of the whole:––

July 26, 1851.