The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau [Footnote:
Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet.
The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.], and their disciples,
in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the
gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral
and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited had
they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for
a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt
as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each
other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all
imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of
the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and
Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never
been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had
never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed
down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had
been extinguished together with its belief.
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