moreover refused a man of fortune because he had an ugly name, is going to be married to Lieutenant Stodge, on the half pay of the Royal Marines-and what then?—I am sure if it were not for the females of my family I should be perfectly at my ease in my proper sphere, out of which the course of our civic constitution raised me. It was unpleasant at first: -but I have toiled long and labored hard; I have done my duty, and Providence has blessed my works. If we were discomposed at the sudden change in our station, I it is who was to blame for having aspired to honors

which I knew were not to last. However, the ambition was not dishonorable, nor did I disgrace the station while I held it; and when I see, as in the present year, that station filled by a man of education and talent, of high character and ample fortune, I discover no cause to repent of having been one of his predecessors. Indeed I ought to apologize for making public the weakness by which we were all affected; especially as I have myself already learned to laugh at what we all severely felt at first -the miseries of a SPLENDID ANNUAL.

"WELL, I am sorry to differ from you," said the commission-merchant, seated in his red dining-parlor, at Highgate, after dinner, while the dusk was rapidly closing; "I am sorry to differ from you; but I must say I would not give a button for fine landscapes, full of a sort of sun-light that scarcely ever shone. My taste is for pictures of old women and school boys playing tricks on one another, and people eating and drinking and laughing. I like to see, in painting, buttered toast and legs of mutton, and all that I have been used to."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed the medical student, who was the commission-merchant's only guest, "do you not see that it is the business of the fine arts to represent not the actual, but that which may be and ought to be? In the world of painting, all that we see around us lives again, but in its proper place, with reference to the absolutely beautiful. The trivial objects which we are usually conversant with become to us, in our actual life, the boundaries and standards of our minds. The painter, the true painter, he who alone is worthy of the name, does not destroy or overlook them; but between and above these petty obstructions he opens to us vistas of the distant and glorious, through which blow in on our souls the airs of Para

dise. All that has ever at any time been wrought within us, is implied in the state of mind which enables us to understand and enjoy the master-pieces of the fine arts.

"Nay, when you deny the existence of that higher and spiritual consciousness, which, if any works of man are to be precious and true, must needs be embodied in them, you deny that popular creed to which you pretend that you are willing to bind your faith. Have not, in fact, all nations, at all times, made for themselves an image of a brighter world, which hangs above the earth like a golden morning cloud over the misty prospect. And of what moment is it, if in some cases there has been a real field and foundation for this belief, unless you can give some reason why men should constantly have agreed to cherish these traditions more than others. They create for themselves a bright sphere with which they fill the past and the future, but which few are strong and wise enough to substantiate in the present.

"Thus the Mohammedan looks back to Eden and forward to Paradise. He remembers, as if it had belonged to the personal consciousness of his childhood, the time when angels walked the earth; when the air was filled with visible genii, lords of pleasure

and power, and dispensers of all the riches of the mines. And what else but this persuasion can have thrown consolation and light around the paths of the Turkman in his grassy waste, and over the bare desarts of the Arab? How would he have been led to live an exulting soldier and die in victory, but by seeing, when he turned his eyes from earth, the firmament opened, and the streams of heaven flowing in freshness, and the melodious trees waving their shadows round the maids who beckon to the expiring warrior? This vision was the talisman of Mohammed; and still, my friend, does it furnish energy and union to the nations of Islam.

"Was the subtle and passionate Greek less devoted to a thought which, with its manifold and living beauty, relieved him from the dullness and deadness of the actual? In the earliest generations of that wondrous people, do we not know that the common eye was an eye of faith, which beheld the unchanging gods, and the spirits of rivers and of forests and of the sea moving among men, with as vivid and corporeal a reality as themselves? They had not only a faith in distant orbs, and separate abodes of superior natures, but saw their deities by the very light of our earthly noon. Not only did Olympus throw its deiform shadow over the world,-not only had they glimpses of that Atlantis which dwelled like a separate star among the lonely waters, but sea-nymphs moved before them along the sands; and gods, in glittering panoplies, marshalled their lines for the battle. They believed in these ethereal beings with the same simple and kindly faith, as in the trees and winds and mountains, the priests and queens, the broad ocean, and the ship, with its military crew, and the tall leader. Neither in after times, when they had begun to trade, and to doubt, more freely than before, (not that I think you are necessarily a sceptic, because you are a merchant,) did they lose their conviction of the existence of a life and value in their mythology. The deities min

gled, indeed, no longer with mankind; but they remained as princes and sages in their own calm and distant sphere. A sacred light surrounded them. Change and trouble could not approach them. Their region was as a crystal globe, setting them apart for especial glory. Yet were they connected by their thoughts and attributes with humanity; and men who could not regard them as mixed or occupied with their trivial follies, might, nevertheless, behold in them serene friends and awful counsellors.

"If the Romans had not believed in gods, the greatness of their country would have been to them a religion. That country, not in its material existence, not at the hour in which they, as individuals, belonged to it, but as a thought, a power, a living and organised being, with a history and a future, was to them the centre and purpose of all; and raised by their love for it above the mean and transitory concerns of the passing moment, they had a high vantage-ground, a stay, a hope, and a supremacy. Thus were they made wise and mighty, and thus did they come as princes and legisla tors to every land in which they set their feet.

"Look from these to the immense and wonderful kingdoms of the east. Neither have they, in their passive apathy, been able to rest satisfied, without creating for themselves a grotesque and monstrous world of beings, brighter and more powerful than men. And is not even that state of inaction, almost approaching to annihilation, which is the ideal of some oriental sects-is not even this an effort to give a higher form than any found in the outward system of things, to a longing and hope which they can but imperfectly satisfy in themselves?

"Or, leaving these speculations as to the times of antiquity and oriental countries, think for a moment of the history of Christian Europe. How strong has been the tendency to change our feet to wings. How earnest men's belief in that shining hierarchy of martyrs, saints, and angels, up the de

grees of which they might lift themselves to the foot of the eternal throne. By what strange influence was it that these visions became more familiar to men's minds, more necessary to their life than the physical elements of existence? Was not the whole spirit of Europe shaped and dyed, age after age, by these traditions and mysteries? And did not the imperious baron, in his blazoned hall, and the serf toiling in his woodland hut, alike find in these images, a twinkling gleam of the spiritual, the universal, and enduring?

"How powerfully, also, and terribly, were principles deeper and more potent than our understandings can master, or our human will contend with, expressed and substantiated in the fateful rites of witchcraft and magic, which wanted not, any more than the mere creations of the fancy, a certain strange and impressive beauty, and cloudy magnificence. The wizard's circle, on the heath, or in the cave-like ruin, was divided indeed from the field and the market, by superstitious terror and insane longing. But it was also set apart from the dreariness and waste of custom and mere selfish prudence, and within it walked, if no where else, shapes that attested man's possible superiority to a higher life than the animal.

"Nor was it only in the devices of churchmen, or in necromantic secrets, that the unsatisfied and high-reaching soul of man endeavored to preserve and nourish its interior faith. Behold the peasant, beaten and famished, quaking with dread of his master, and scowling the menace of revenge, reduced almost to the degradation of the wretched dog or laboring horse, yet keeping in his withered heart one spot of living green, haunted by the silver footsteps of the fairies, and all its wild flowers trembling, while they are fanned by hovering wings of tiny angels. Through the wintry chinks of his hovel, or among the branches of the gloomy wood, he looks at some moments of his weary life, with joy and confidence, at the jewels on the cloaks and crowns of dancing elves;

and through the mournful and ruinous passages of his soul tinkles the fairy music, and tells him that he has still a spirit formed to converse with the lovely, the cheerful, and the innocent. He gazes with faith and hope, and the merry phantoms become more numerous and more eager; they whirl around him in a dance of wild and infant-like rejoicing; one leaps with laughable gestures in the air; another wheels and darts like a dragon-fly over the water; here, in a ring, the little female genii circle and toy with the gallant elves; and, drinking honeydew under a grove of fern, a train of glow-worm spirits chime out a chorus of delicate notes. There the tale-teller, astride on a floating cob-web, makes fantastic grimaces, and varies with a changeful voice, clear as that of the linnet, his story of enchanted gold and punished misers; and deals around in showers, like apple-blossoms falling in the morning wind, his jests at the thin and misty elfin wealth, and the capricious spriteliness of fairy love.

"Would you tie down the mind of this poor slave to trust in nothing but the reports of his senses and of the conventional voice of society? Would you leave him no treasure or staff but the thorns and thistles with which his rugged hands are too familiar; no more enlivening drink than the bitter draught of wretchedness which he drew from his mother's paps, on which his boyhood has been nourished, and which has well nigh imbruted all the faculties of his manhood? Is that which the earth yields to us, and which we can win from the niggardliness of others, so easy of digestion, so sweet, and nourishing, that we can afford to strike with barrenness, and abstain from cultivating the rich and flowery region laid open to us in our hearts? No, my friend, do not say that you care for nothing but the actual; or the actual itself will lose, ere long, whatever it now has of bloom and charm. Men will soon become weary of that which is near and round them, if they do not look before, be

hind them, and above. Leave to the Mohammedan his Paradise; blame not the Boeotian, or the Argian, that he thought with joy of Olympus and of Pindus; nor the Roman, that he had faith in the deity of Rome and of Capitolian Jove. The Hindoo feels that he has a wisdom of his own, when he looks from the plain of Bengal to the cloud-like pinnacle of snow, where soars and shines Meru; and the Teutonic herdsman was only raised above his cattle by his belief in the angel, and the saint, the ghost, the goblin, and the fairy.

"I will even add more than this. When you say that you like a picture which represents what you have been used to see about you every day, you do not mean one which represents the particular objects that you have been accustomed to, but objects of a similar kind, better arranged, for the purpose of being painted, than, perhaps, you ever saw them. Now, whatever superiority of arrangement there may be-to whatever degree the household furniture, the game, and clothes, and common-place countenances are connected and contrasted more pictorially than you commonly see them, to that degree the picture is removed from the region of the actual, and brought into the world of intelligence, and art, and beauty. For whence comes the law or principle by which those objects are disposed and harmonised, so as to produce even the mean and feeble effect which is designed to be their result, but from a thought, a power existing in the mind of the painter, in some degree perceived by you, and not at all to be found in the things themselves?

"If, then, as is evident, you cannot propose to derive any other pleasure from pictures than a child's delight in the gay colors, (an enjoyment which you may have in a greater degree from a Persian carpet, or a kaleidoscope,) without acknowledging your subservience (a subservience which produces the only true freedom of mind) to thought and imagination, why should you seek to obey the most meagre and 58 ATHENEUM, VOL. 2, 3d series.

weakest forms of intelligence, instead of exalting yourself by submission to the highest? If you would be made happy by knowledge and love of the fine arts, reverence them in their noblest powers and works. Make yourself a citizen of that state whereof the institutions and rulers are the various forms of truth and beauty. Here is the real dominion and abode of painting; here dwells habitually the painter, and creates around him his own universe of graceful shapes and expressive hues, wherein every mode of human thought has its appropriate and proportionate manifestation by lines and colors; and which melts away, around its whole horison, into a world more awful and profound than even art can dare to invade.

"The painter lives in calm, and a soft and sunless light; and to his eyes every hidden emotion, and low deeprooted principle, flowers out into a subject for the exercise of his skill. In quiet and brooding thought consists his magic; and the pencil he uses is of wider sway than the seal of Aschmedai or Solomon. In his ethereal atmosphere a thousand genii inhabit, the mysterious, the oracular, the holy, which you will not meet with in the street or the manufactory, but of which, in the still and self-meditating pauses of our lives, we all acknowledge the being and ministry. Justly has painting been made the art of Christianity, of that which embodies the highest and the largest thought, and which the parables of Jesus and the pictures of Raphael may prove to us to endow with meaning a greater variety of the symbols whereby man is encircled in this animated world, than would the fancies of all poets, or the systems of all philosophers. How little, how very little of the treasures of this art would he be master of, who should look for them only in the shells and husks of the material creation, or in all that is most aimless of the habits and fashions of our social life! Weary not yourself with perpetually climbing and reclimbing the stile which obstructs the entrance to this noble vis