Social Progress in Ireland Since the Union

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 Excerpt: ..."country matters." The direct influence of metropolitan life, however, would not permit this subjective tendency to overpass a certain limit, for city life is civilized, not lawless; and is selfrestrained rather than violently self-asserting. It is eminently fitted to give a keen sense of what is low, mean, absurd, and burlesque. That this influence is, on the whole, adverse to true poetry I cannot believe. Never did two men enjoy more a smutty jest than Chaucer and Shakspere; never had any man a higher conception than these two of whatsoever is true, pure, lovely, and of good report. A sense of the ridiculous may stop many heroics--I hope it will continue to do so; but I hold that we love a good poem none the less because we have laughed, for once in a way, at a good parody of it. Ridicule is the touchstone of heroics; and if Rosalind's passion will not bear the clown's burlesque, it were best she hanged herself in her own garters. The London life of Shakspere, far from checking his loftier flights, has bequeathed to us Hamlet. And into Hamlet the ludicrous is admitted with exquisite artistic effect. Unfortunately, the nature of Milton, and his unhappy times, made London degenerate for him into a palace of Circe on the one hand, and a monster Methody meeting on the other. The result is glaringly apparent more than once in Paradise Lost; the poet did not know when he was becoming ridiculous. The same is true of Wordsworth. How much of this divine poet's work is the tamest and most commonplace rubbish! In another way the want of city-culture clings like a leprosy on the finest work of Byron and Shelley. For city life makes the poet first of all a man of the world, who will love himself too well to take the trouble of hating or abusing either God or...