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sanctify them--he gives us the poor, even to the gipsy and the beggar as they really are contented if our interest is excited, and knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings-from the tents of the warriors he comes--equally at home with manin in all respects-to the cottager's hearth;-he bids us turn. from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter-he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No, never was there one—not even Burns himself—who forced us more intimately to acknowledge, or more deeply to feel, that

"The rank is but the guinea stamp,

The man's the gowd, for a' that."

And is this being, to whom intellect taught philanthropy, to be judged by ordinary rules?-are we to guage and meet his capacities of good, by the common measure we apply to common men?-No! there was in him a large and Catholic sympathy with all classes, all tempers, all conditions of men; and this it was that redeemed his noble works from the taint of party, and all the leaven of sectarianism; this it was that made him, if the Tory in principle, the all-embracing leader in practice. Compare with that he has done for the peoplein painting the people,-the works of poets called Liberal by the doctrinaires-compare the writings of Scott with those of Byron-which have really tended the most to bind us to the poor?-The first have touched the homely strings of our real heart-the other has written fine vague stanzas about freedom. Lara, the Corsair, Childe Harold, Don Juan, these are the works-we will not say of the misanthrope-at least of the aristocrat. Are Scott's so? Yet Byron was a Liberal, and Scott a Tory. Alas, the sympathy with humanity is the true republicanism of a writer of fiction. Liberal and Tory are words which signify nothing out of the sphere of the politics of the day. Who shall we select from the Liberal poets of our age who has bound us to the people, like Scott-Shelley, with his metaphysical refinings?Moore, with his elaborate floridity of patriotism?

VOL. I.-5

No! we feel at once that Nature taught Scott more of friendship with all mankind, than the philosophy of the one or the fancy of the other. Out of print, Scott might belong to a party-in print, mankind belonged to him. Toryism, which is another name for the spirit of monopoly, forsook him at that point where is inquiries into human nature began. He is not then, we apprehend, justly liable to the charges of wanting a sound moraleven a great political moral-(and political morals are the greatest of all)--in the general tenor of works which have compelled the highest classes to examine and respect the lowest. In this, with far less learning, far less abstract philosophy, than Fielding, he is only exceeded by him in one character-(and that, indeed, the most admirable in English fiction)--the character of Parson Adams. Jeanie Deans is worth a thousand such as Fanny Andrews. Fielding Le Sage, and Cervantes are the only three writers, since the world began, with whom, as a novelist he can be compared. And, perhaps, he excels them, as Voltaire excelled all the writers of his nation, not by the superior merits of one work, but by the brilliant aggregate of many. Tom Jones, Gil Blas, Don Quixote, are without doubt, greater, much greater productions than Waverly; but the authors of of Tom Jones, Gil Blas, and even of Don Quixote, have not manifested the same fertile and mighty genius as the author of the Waverly Novels.

And that genius-seemingly so inexhaustible--is quenched at length! We can be charmed no more-the elegant tongue is mute-the master's wand is broken up-the right hand hath forgot its cunning-the cord that is loosened was indeed of silver-and the bowl that is broken at the dark well was of gold beyond all price.

Death, of late, has been busy amongst the great men of earth-the mighty land-marks of the last age, one after one have been removed:-Cuvier, Mackintosh, Bentham, Goethe, and now Scott-there is something, as it were mysterious and solemn in the disappearance of so many lights of the age, within so short an interval of each other; and happening, as it does at a period

when the old elements of society are shaken to the centre, it might have seemed to ancient superstition as if the world were preparing itself for an unexperienced era, and the removal of the chiefs of the past time betokened the advent of a new order of mind suited to the new disposition of event.

When a great man dies he leaves a chasm which eternity cannot fill. Others succeed to his fame-but never to the exact place which he held in the world's eye; they may be greater than the one we lost-but they are not he. Shakspeare built not his throne on the same site as Homer-nor Scott on that whence Shakspeare looked down upon the universe. The gap which Scott leaves in the world is the token of the space he filled in the homage of his times. A hundred ages hence our posterity will still see that wide interval untenanted -a vast and mighty era in the intellectual world, which will prove how spacious were "the city and the temple, whose summit has reached to Heaven.”

THE AUTHOR OF " EUGENE ARAM."

ART IN FICTION.

[Monthly Chronicle, 1838.]

ART is that process by which we give to natural materials the highest excellence they are capable of receiving.、

We estimate the artist, not only in proportion to the success of his labours, but in proportion to the intellectual faculties which are necessary to that success. Thus, a watch by Breguét is a beautiful work of art, and so is a tragedy by Sophocles:-The first is even more perfect of its kind than the last, but the tragedy requires higher intellectual faculties than the watch; and we esteem the tragedian above the watch-maker.

The excellence of art consists in the fitness of the object proposed with the means adopted. Art carried to its perfection would be the union of the most admirable object with the most admirable means; in other words, it would roquiro a greatness in the conception correspondent to the genius in the execution. But as mechanical art is subjected to more definite and rigorous laws than intellectual art, so, in the latter, a comprehensive critic regards the symmetry of the whole with large indulgence towards blemishes in detail. We contemplate mechanical art with reference to its utility -intellectual art with reference to its beauty. A single defect in a watch may suffice to destroy all the value of its construction-a single blemish in a tragedy may scarcely detract from its effect.

In regarding any work of art, we must first thoroughly acquaint ourselves with the object that the artist had in view. Were an antiquarian to set before

us a drawing, illustrative of the costume of the Jews in the time of Tiberius, we should do right to blame him if he presented to our eye goblets in the fashion of the fifteenth century; but when Leonardo da Vinci undertook the sublime and moving representation of the Last Supper, we feel that his object is not that of an antiquary; and we do not regard it as a blemish that the apostles are seated upright instead of being recumbent, and that the loaves of bread are those of an Italian baker. Perhaps, indeed, the picture affected the spectators the more sensibly from their familiarity with the details; and the effect of art on the whole was only heightened by a departure from correctness in minutiæ. So, in an anatomical drawing that professed to give the exact proportions of man, we might censure the designer if the length of the limbs were disproportioned to the size of the trunk; but, when the sculptor of the Apollo Belvidere desired to convey to the human eye the ideal of the God of Youth, the length of the limbs contributed to give an additional and super-human lightness and elasticity to the form; and the excellence of the art was evinced and promoted by the sacrifice of mechanical accuracy in detail. It follows, therefore, that intellectual art and technical correctness are far from identical -that one is sometimes proved by the disdain of the other. And, as this makes the distinction between mechanical and intellectual art, so is the distinction remarkable in proportion as that intellectual art is exercised in the highest degree-in proportion as it realizes the ideal. For the ideal consists not in the imitation, but the exaltation, of nature; and we must accordingly inquire, not how far it resembles what we have seen so much as how far it embodies what we can imagine.

It is not till we have had great pictures, that we can lay down the rules of painting-it is not till we have had great writers in a particular department of intellect, that we can sketch forth a code of laws for those who succeed them for the theory of art resembles that of science; we must have data to proceed upon, and our inductions must be drawn from a vast store of experi

ments.

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