of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in
calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected.
The sun illuminates the hills, while it is still below the
horizon, and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little
before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent
of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a
light, which, without their assistance, must, in a short time, be
visible to those who lie far beneath them.

The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on
which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and
sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which
regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility
and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste are, in
general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is
spontaneously pursuing. Without a just apprehension of the laws
to which we have alluded the merits and defects of Dryden can be
but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we
conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been
produced have by no means been those in which taste has been most
correct. It seems that the creative faculty, and the critical
faculty, cannot exist together in their highest perfection. The
causes of this phenomenon it is not difficult to assign.

It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to
pieces, and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all
its wheels and springs conduce to its general effect, will be the
man most competent to form another machine of similar power. In