A letter to Henry Cline, on imperfect developments of the faculties, mental and moral, as well as constitutional and organic, and on the treatment of impediments of speech.

  • Thelwall, John, 1764-1834.
Date:
1810
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to Henry Cline, on imperfect developments of the faculties, mental and moral, as well as constitutional and organic, and on the treatment of impediments of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    more important inference of the practical appli-~ cability of the sympathy between the perceptive and executive organs, and the consequent opera- tion of the system of musical proportions, under judicious management, occurred, with all its ines- timable consequences, to my mind. With respect to Milton, in particular, — and may not a similar observation, with equal proba- bility, be applied to Homer ?—it is not unlikely that the blindness of the poet (which necessitated him to compose his verses orally,—or, at least, to recite what he had composed, before they could be transcribed)—might have givenan increased portion of that strength, that natural and copious melody, and that variety, to the rhythmus and numbers of his divine poem, which (even if it had no other excellence) would place the Paradise Lost in me- rited supereminence above every other composition — in the English language. Certain it is, that, if ihe finger-counting critics of our immortal bard had studied the physiological principles of human utterance, instead of seeking for the rules of criticism in their enumeration table, many of those lines which have been condemned as lame and prosaic, would have been extolled as among the