Commerce. Commerce has enriched thousands, it has been the cause of the spread of knowledge and of science, but has it added one particle of happiness or of moral improvement? Has it given us a truer insight into our duties, or tended to revive and sustain in us the better feelings of our nature? No! no! when I consider what the consequences have been, when I consider that whole districts of men, who would otherwise have slumbered on in comparatively happy ignorance, are now little less than brutes in their lives, and something worse than brutes in their instincts, I could almost wish that the manufacturing districts were swallowed up as Sodom and Gomorrah. The Mind. The idea of the mind forming images of itself, is as absurd as the belief of Descartes with respect to the external world. There is nothing in the mind which was not previously in the senses, except the mind itself. Philosophy, properly so called, began with Pythagoras. He saw that the mind, in the common sense of the word, was itself a fact, that there was something in the mind not individual; this was the pure reason, something in which we are, not which is in us. Socrates. Socrates seems to have been continually oscillating between the good and the useful. Experience. To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. Dr. Aikin. On William Smith, of Norwich, asking me what I thought of the Monthly Review or Magazine, and of Dr. Aikin, its editor, I was provoked, by his evident wish that I should say something in its favour, to reply,—“ That all men of science or literature could attest that the one was a void Aikin, and the other an aching void.” Popularity. Neither philosophy nor poetry ever did, nor as long as they are terms of comparative excellence and contradistinction, ever can be popular, nor honoured with the praise and favour of contemporaries. But, on the other hand, there never was a time in which either books, that were held for excellent as poetic or philosophic, had so extensive and rapid a sale, or men reputed poets and philosophers of a high rank were so much looked up to in society, or so munificently, almost profusely, rewarded. Walter Scott's poems and novels (except only the two wretched abortions, Ivanhoe and the Bride of Ravensmuir, or whatever its name may be) supply both instance and solution of the present conditions and components of popularity, viz., to amuse without requiring any effort of thought, and without exciting any deep emotion. The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as, a day or two after a thorough debauch and long sustained drinking match, a man feels all over like a bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole, and where "I admire" is but a synonym for "I remember I liked it very much when I was reading it,” is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion. Compare Waverley, Guy Mannering, and Co., with works that had an immediate run in the last generation, Tristram Shandy, Roderick Random, Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa Harlowe, and Tom Jones (all which became popular as soon as published, and therefore instances fairly in point), and you will be convinced that the difference of taste is real, and not any fancy or croaking of my own.—Jan., 1821. Husbands and Wives. I sometimes think I shall write a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands. If such a book were well written, I cannot doubt but that its results would be most salutary. I am inclined to think that both men and women err in their conduct and demeanour towards each other, quite as much from ignorance and unconsciousness of what is displeasing, as from selfishness or disregard. But to the execution of such a work, or rather such works (for "A New Duty of Man" is quite as much required, and this must be written by an affectionate and right-minded woman), the present sickly delicacy, the over-delicacy (and therefore essential indelicacy) of the present taste would be opposed. To be of any use it should be a plain treatise, the results of experience, and should be given to all newly married couples by their parents, not in the form of admonition, but rather as containing much important information which they can no where else obtain. Scott's Poetry. Not twenty lines of Scott's poetry will ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing. Few Poets from the Lower Classes. It is very singular that no true poet should have arisen from the lower classes, when it is considered that every peasant who can read knows more of books now than did Eschylus, Sophocles, or Homer; yet if we except Burns, none1 such have been. Crashaw. Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of, In after years he excepted Elliot, the smith, though he held his udgment in very slight estimation.-Note by Allsop. Y what we now term, sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is selfevident. In that on the name of Jesus equally so; but his lines on St. Theresa are the finest. Where he does combine richness of thought and diction nothing can excel,1 as in the lines you so much admire— "Since 'tis not to be had at home, She'l travel to a martyrdome. No home for her confesses she, But where she may a martyr be. She'l to the Moores, and trade with them For this invalued diadem ; She offers them her dearest breath, With Christ's name in't, in change for death. For Him she'l teach them how to die. Farewell all pleasures, sports, and joys, Mother's arms or father's knee; These verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of Christabel; if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem. Shakspere's Intuition. The wonderful faculty which Shakspere above all other men possessed, or rather the power which possessed him in the highest degree, of anticipating everything, evidently is the result at least partakes of meditation, or that mental 1 Some word or words are wanting after "excel." Coleridge gives the text of the first edition of Steps to the Temple, 1646. For" she offers" the edition of 1652 substitutes "she'l offer," and "Her Lord's " for "The Lord's ", below,-both improvements. process which consists in the submitting to the operation of thought every object of feeling, or impulse, or passion observed out of it. I would be willing to live only as long as Shakspere were the mirror to nature. The Sublime. What can be finer in any poet than that beautiful passage in Milton And thousands of his saints around." This is grandeur, but it is grandeur without completeness: but he adds which is the highest sublime. There is total completeness. So I would say that the Saviour praying on the Mountain, the Desert on one hand, the Sea on the other, the city at an immense distance below, was sublime. But I should say of the Saviour looking towards the City, his countenance full of pity, that he was majestic, and of the situation that it was grand. When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multiety, there results shapeliness-forma formosa. Where the perfection of form is combined with pleasurableness in the sensations, excited by the matters or substances so formed, there results the beautiful. Corollary. Hence colour is eminently subservient to beauty, because it is susceptible of forms, i.e. outline, and yet is a sensation. But a rich mass of scarlet clouds, seen without any attention to the form of the mass or of the parts, may be a delightful but not a beautiful object or colour. When there is a deficiency of unity in the line forming the whole (as angularity, for instance), and of number in the plurality or the parts, there arises the formal. When the parts are numerous, and impressive, and predominate, so as to prevent or greatly lessen the attention to the whole, there results the grand. Where the impression of the whole, i.e. the sense of unity, |