"The minstralcie, the service at the feste, CHAUCER. The word snug, however, reminds me that amidst all the languages, ancient and modern, it belongs exclusively to our own; and that nothing but a want of ideas suggested by that soul-wrapping epithet could have induced certain frigid connoisseurs to tax our climate with want of genius, supposing, forsooth, that because we have not the sunshine of the Southern countries, we have no other warmth for our veins, and that, because our skies are not hot enough to keep us in doors, we have no excursiveness of wit and range of imagination. It seems to me that a great deal of good argument in refutation of these calumnies has been wasted upon Monsieur du Bos and the Herr Winckelman: the one a narrow-minded, pedantic Frenchman, to whom the freedom of our genius was incomprehensible; the other, an Italianized German, who being suddenly transported into the sunshine, began frisking about with unwieldy vivacity, and concluded that nobody could be great or bewitching out of the pale of his advantages. Milton, it is true, in his "Paradise Lost," ex presses an injudicious apprehension lest "An age too late, or cold Climate, or years, damp his intended wing; " but the very complaint which foreign critics bring against him, as well as Shakespeare, is that his wing was not damped enough, that it was too daring and unsubdued; and he not only avenges himself nobly of his fears by a flight beyond all Italian poetry, but shows, like the rest of his countrymen, that he could turn the coldness of his climate into a new species of inspiration, as I shall presently make manifest. Not to mention, however, that the Greeks and Romans, Homer in particular, saw a great deal worse weather than these critics would have us imagine; the question is, would the poets themselves have thought as they did? Would Tyrtæus, the singer of patriotism, have complained of being an Englishman? Would Virgil, who delighted in husbandry, and whose first wish was to be a philosopher, have complained of living in our pastures, and being the countryman of Newton? Would Homer, the observer of character, the panegyrist of freedom, the painter of storms, of landscapes, and of domestic tenderness, aye, and the lover of snug house-room and a good dinner, would he have complained of our humors, of our liberty, of our shifting skies, of our ever-green fields, our conjugal happiness, our firesides, and our hospitality? I only wish the reader and I had him at this party of ours after dinner, with a lyre on his knee, and a goblet, as he says, to drink as he pleased, "Piein, hote thumos anogoi." ODYSS. lib. viii. v. 70. I am much mistaken if our blazing fire and our freedom of speech would not give him a warmer inspiration than ever he felt in the person of Demodocus, even though placed on a lofty seat, and regaled with slices of brawn from a prince's table. The ancients, in fact, were by no means deficient in enthusiasm at sight of a good fire; and it is to be presumed that, if they had enjoyed such firesides as ours, they would have acknowledged the advantages which our genius presents in winter, and almost been ready to conclude, with old Cleveland, that the sun himself was nothing but "Heaven's coalery; A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame." The ancient hearth was generally in the middle of the room, the ceiling of which let out the smoke; it was supplied with charcoal or faggots, and consisted sometimes of a brazier or chafing-dish (the focus of the Romans), sometimes of a mere elevation or altar (the ἔστια or ἔσχαρα of the Greeks). We may easily imagine the smoke and annoyance which this custom must have occasioned, not to mention the bad complexions which are caught by hanging over a fuming-pan, as the faces of the Spanish ladies bear melancholy witness. The stoves, however, in use with the countrymen of Mons. du Bos and Winckelman are, if possible, still worse, having a dull, suffocating effect, with nothing to recompense the eye. The abhorrence of them which Ariosto expresses in one of his satires, when, justifying his refusal to accompany Cardinal d'Este into Germany, he reckons up the miseries of its wintertime, may have led M. Winckelman to conclude that all the Northern resources against cold were equally intolerable to an Italian genius; but Count Alfieri, a poet, at least as warmly inclined as Ariosto, delighted in England; and the great romancer himself, in another of his satires, makes a commodious fireplace the climax of his wishes with regard to lodging. In short, what did Horace say, or rather what did he not say, of the raptures of in-door sociality, Horace, who knew how to enjoy sunshine in all its luxury, and who nevertheless appears to have snatched a finer inspiration from absolute frost and snow? I need not quote all those beautiful little invitations he sent to his acquaintances, telling one of them that a neat room and a sparkling fire were waiting for him; describing to another the smoke springing out of the roof in curling volumes, and even congratulating his friends in general on the opportunity of enjoyment afforded them by a stormy day; but, to take leave at once of these frigid connoisseurs, hear with what rapture he describes one of those friendly parties, in which he passed his winter evenings, and which only wanted the finish of our better morality and our patent fireplaces, to resemble the one I am now fancying. And streams with icy fetters bound With well-heap'd logs dissolve the cold, And feed the genial hearth with fires, And sprightly wit and mirth inspires. Th' appointed hour of promis'd bliss, The pleasing whisper in the dark, The half unwilling, willing kiss, The laugh that guides thee to the mark, When the kind nymph would coyness feign, And hides but to be found again, These, these are joys the gods for youth ordain." DRYDEN. The Roman poet, however, though he occasionally boasts of his temperance, is too apt to lose sight of the intellectual part of his entertainment, or at least to make the sensual part predominate over the intellectual. Now, I reckon the nicety of social enjoyment to consist in the reverse; and, after partaking with Homer of his plentiful boiled and roast, and with Horace of his flowercrowned wine-parties, the poetical reader must come at last to us barbarians of the North for the perfection of fireside festivity, that is to say, for the union of practical philosophy with absolute merriment, for light meals and unintoxicating glasses; for refection that administers to enjoyment, instead of repletions that at once constitute and contradict it. I am speaking, of course, not of our commonplace eaters and drinkers, but of our classical arbiters of pleasure, as contrasted with those of other countries; these, it is observable, have all delighted in Horace, and copied him as far as their tastes were con |