Note 44 — Chapter XX

We have five names unrivalled in modern times and in their different ways:—Newton, Locke, Bacon, Shakspeare, and Milton—and if to these we were to add a sixth that could not be questioned in his line, perhaps it would be Hogarth. Our wit is the effect not of gaiety, but spleen—the last result of a pertinacious reductio ad absurdum. Our greatest wits have been our gravest men. Fielding seems to have produced his History of a Foundling with the same deliberation and forethought that Arkwright did his spinning-jenny. The French have no poetry; that is, no combination of internal feeling with external imagery. Their dramatic dialogue is frothy verbiage or a mucilage of sentiment without natural bones or substance: ours constantly clings to the concrete, and has a purchase upon matter. Outward objects interfere with and extinguish the flame of their imagination: with us they are the fuel that kindle it into a brighter and stronger blaze.