To artists, "the metaphysic" has been a downright Will-o'-the-wisp

an ignis fatuus, or wild fire."-It has led them only into bogs. I pass by musicians, as a hopeless, not to say disagreeable, subject; but what artist of any description has not been deluded by what he (God save the mark!) called "abstract reasoning?" "The nonsense of the stone ideal," has spoiled all the sculptors, time immemorial. The single word "classical" has destroyed its thousands and ten thousands. How many acres of canvass have been barbarously ruined by " effect!" How many poets have broken their backs in straining after "dignity" and the "heroic, according to Aristotle!" If Parliament were to pass a law to cause these terms to be proscribed and forgotten, like the name of him "who fired the Ephesian dome," it would be a public benefit. The word "Picturesque" seems chiefly to have sinned, in being the cause of manifold bulky volumes coming into existence, which, so far as concerns the explanation of the subject, whereof they profess to treat, might as well never have been written. The books on this subject are made up of assertions; assertions just enough, perhaps; but still forming only a string of truisms in the disguise of an inquiry. They are VOL. XIV.

dogmatical, (dealers in taste are generally so,) and not explanatory. Their gusto is, as it were, "Evangelical.” They " preach up" something; and if you ask why, they answer (God wot) by an appeal to their feelings, that it is so and so-and there the matter ends. This is the way fiddlers use you, when you are rash enough to be sceptical as to the merits of some noise of an overture, or labyrinth of a cadence, and then, like many other polemicals, conclude by getting into a passion. But to the subject. Let any one read Knight, and Burke, and Gilpin, "and the rest," as Barry Cornwall would say, and then honestly confess whether he knows more than he did before of the meaning of the words Picturesque and Beautiful, as used by artists. I mean the fundamental meaning; the just principle; "the reason wherefore." It is not to tell us that "this is picturesque, but not beautiful," and that "this is beautiful, but not picturesque." It is not to inform us, that each of these two things gives pleasure to the mind in a different way, and in a greater or less degree,—it is not this that can satisfy us. It is the naked principle upon which the mind acts, and by which it is acted upon, when it receives this pleasure, that we want to know-and of this we are told

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nothing. We do not deny the facts; but the "quamobrem" and the " quomodo" are still wanting. Yet the Picturesque and Beautiful have always appeared to me to be capable of being resolved into two very simple principles. The treatises expressly on the subject, however, stop short at effects, without almost the slightest attempt to evolve causes; and if I had not been pleased with our friend Galt's Ringan Gilhaize on any other score, I must have been delighted to find it contain a passage, which, by the peculiar position of a single word, affords me at once a motto for my sheet, and a key to my principle. The peculiar adjective is marked by italics. Its singular application in this striking passage has probably produced a feeling of embarrassment and uncertainty in many readers. To explain its fitness in this place to shew how this single term may be said to contain the marrow of the Picturesque, is the "forlorn hope" of the following remarks.

If any one be at the trouble to consult the many wire-drawn and desultory treatises which have been put forth" about and about" the Picturesque and Beautiful, he will find, I believe, that they all end, after many a weary catalogue of things which are, or are not, picturesque or beautiful, in laying down as a sort of general rule, that picturesque objects are rough, beautiful ones smooth. Dilapidated buildings, intermingling trees, perturbed waters, are, say they, picturesque. Glassy lakes, regular architecture, smooth hills, and shaven lawns, are beautiful. Good-but why are we delighted with these things in such opposite and unaccountable ways? Why do we call a regularly built palace beautiful, and yet not tolerate it in a picture (or scarcely so) until it has tumbled down, and is overgrown with ivy, and choked up with weeds and brushwood? Discuss unto me, good Book-maker, what is the cause of all this apparent contradiction. I know well enough it is no joke to call the Picturesque "a picture askew;" but I want, farther, to know how this comes about-" the plain song of it;" in short, why landscape painters and their admirers are contented to draw any object, natural or artificial, in the precise ratio of its worthlessness in all other respects:-Why they luxuriate in tumble-down temples, deserted mona

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steries, ill-grown trees, twisted shrubs, coarse grass, withered leaves, old women, broken pots, hoopless casks, trodden-down corn, Shetland ponies, starved Jackasses, with masters more ragged than Lazarus in the painted cloth!" A painter, like the owl in the fable, loves Sultan Mahmoud, because he can give him "fifty ruined villages." Now this cannot be all whim and caprice. Whole bodies of men would not thus run mad "northnorth-west" for nothing. "There

must be reason for it, if philosophy could find it out."

It seems to be a universal law of our nature, that we attain to pleasurable feelings through two opposite media. There is the excitement of unusual exertion, mental or corporeal, or both mixed; and there is the pleasure of unexpected ease or quiescence. The first should appear to consist in the delight of overcoming a more than ordinary difficulty; the last in finding less difficulty than ordinary to overcome. This is applicable, more or less, in some shape or other, to every description, probably, of mental and corporeal action. Thus we take pleasure in ascending a mountain or climbing a rock from the difficulty overcome; and in skaiting, riding, or sailing, from the unusual ease with which we move. In reading, we are pleased with subtle argumentation, acute logic, or profound analysis, from the first principle, that of difficulty overcome; but with smooth poetry, or easy and familiar prose, from the unexpected quickness with which the mind is led forward. The pleasure of riddles contrasted with that derived from those rhymes that are used as a "memoria technica," or artificial memory, is an instance in point; and of the same description is the pleasure received from hearing or playing difficult and complicated music, compared with that which arises from a flowing and simple air. It is needless to multiply examples. The general principle must, I think, be admitted to be true. Whether it may help us to a solution of the origin of the Picturesque and Beautiful-that is to say, of the modes of the different descriptions of pleasure which we draw from the contemplation of objects coming under those denominations, is the next inquiry.

In order to ascertain whether those principles elucidate the causes of the