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.

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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 21

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 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 case 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

different sorts of pleasure, derivable from the view of certain objects called picturesque and beautiful, we must inquire whether these objects generally are adapted to call up the feelings in question according to the principles supposed. Let us take an example. The most picturesque object, perhaps, in nature, is a tree. Why is it so? Because the distribution of its parts is so infinitely complicated, and so wonderfully diversified, that the mind cannot, even by the longest-continued efforts, attain to a full and complete idea and remembrance of them. No painter could ever delineate a tree, branch by branch, leaf by leaf. If he did, no spectator could decide whether he had done so or not. Our most distinct idea of a tree is only general. We have little more than an outline. The greater and more superficial indentions of its foliage, its larger interstices of branch, its masses of shadow, and its most pervading hues, are enough for us. We are compelled to lump and sloven over a million of beautiful particularities, exquisite minutenesses, which our apprehension is not microscopic enough to seize in the detail. In spite of ourselves we make a daub of it even in imagination. Hence, in the contemplation of masses of foliage, there is a perpetual excitement and struggle of the mind to obtain a complete idea-a constant approach with an impossibility of reaching the desired goal. DIFFICULTY, then, is the source of the Picturesque. Irregular variety is its life. Regularity, plan, and method, are its antipodes. They constitute the essence of the opposite quality-the Beautiful -the term being, of course, used in a limited sense.

Let us try to elucidate this farther. I have said, that the pleasure we derive from the contemplation of objects which are styled Beautiful, as opposed to Picturesque, arises from the unexpected ease and readiness with which we comprehend the distribution of their parts. Take regular architecture as a specimen. In the largest and most complex edifice of Grecian or modern regular architecture, general simplicity and order are the ground-work. Let the minor parts be ornamented as they will-let the details be ever so elaborate, ever so diversified, still the general design is at the first view fully present to the mind. Let any one look at the Parthenon, at St Peter's, at St

Paul's, at Blenheim or Versailles, and he comprehends their plan at once. He perceives immediately that the parts of these immense edifices answer to each other; tower to tower, wing to wing, pillar to pillar, window to window. He is struck with the triumph of order. He comprehends at a single glance the distribution of millions of tons of marble or freestone-the disposal of thousands of yards of complicate ornament. He lays out at once correctly in his mind acres of lawn and shrubberymiles of terrace or parterre. This pleasurable sense of unexpected ease is the foundation of the Beautiful as contrasted with the Picturesque. They are produced and reproduced by the alternate destruction of each other. The introduction of confusion is the origin of the first, and the remedy of that confusion, of the second.

Let us take, for instance, the most beautiful temple that Grecian architecture can boast. While perfect, it is no great subject of a picture in the abstract. But let time work his will with it. Let the columns fall, let the roof shrink, let moss and decay and violence deform the stones, let trees and brushwood and long grass spring about it, and in it, and upon it-until every straight line be broken and all uniformity destroyed, and it is picturesque. It becomes so because the original regularity of the plan is lost. We have to labour out the idea of its present state without assistance from its former beauty; or with such assistance as impedes more than it helps. If the column on the right stands, that on the left is prostrate. If this pedestal is entire, that is broken. If the wall here is regular, there it is shrunk or shattered. If this stone is smooth, that is rough. If this part is white, that is black. It is a chaos, a ruin,and can only be pictured and retained in the mind by intense observance and prolonged contemplation.

If this mode of trial be applied to other objects, it will be found to answer in the same manner. A ship, for instance, with her yards squared, her sails bent, and every rope entire, sailing steadily on a smooth sea, at right angles with the line of vision, is as little picturesque as so complicated an object can well be. Wreck that same vessel, however. Let her lie obliquely on her keel, "docked in sand." See her when